The best bet here is that the Novell monies (per the court judgement, this is money belonging to Novell and illegally "converted" [i.e., stolen] by SCO) are not subject to the bankruptcy process; instead, Novell gets to recover that amount before the Chapter 11 reorganization. It seems logical for the bankruptcy judge to either allow the Utah court to establish the amount of that judgement, or simply declare "It all belongs to Novell," before proceeding with a reorganization, given that the Novell judgement is what tips SCO into the bin.
So, my $.02 is on Novell being unconditionally awarded the judgement in the amount determined Real Soon Now by one of the two courts ahead of the Chapter 11 process, and there being nothing left for SCO and its other creditors but scorchmarks.
Your.sig reminds me of an old chestnut:
No weapon of the enemy's is as dangerous as one of your own second lieutenants armed with a map and compass. (From Murphy's Laws of Combat, I believe, though I'm probably mangling the quote.)
Device manufacturers, especially the cheap ones, tend to use cheap/quick/easy chipsets that often have Windows-targeted reference drivers, or they cobble their own. NOT all of these work at all well (I've had endless problems with cheap USB drives gagging a Win98 box 'cause their legacy drivers are crap.) But, the Windows monopoly has meant that there's immense Windows-centric inertia in low-end commodity peripherals.
This will slowly change as Linux gains desktop traction and Vista drives users toward The Penguin. It *will* happen, Linux support WILL improve, but it will take a while to become easily available. There are many forces pushing Linux adoption forward, it'll just be a while before it becomes embarrassing for a vendor to NOT provide Linux support.
1. Take large sheet of tinfoil 2. Wrap that sucker up like a ham-and-Limburger sandwich 3. Explain to the nice folks at the X-ray machine why that suspicious package is your iPhone 4. Be unable to get emergency calls from your family at home while on your Mediterranean cruise
Of course, there's always the simple, brute-force power-down solution: the iHammer. (Can you tell how unimpressed I am with this overpriced, overhyped gewgaw?)
Federal judges have life tenure unless impeached by Congress for misconduct, and while this Congress has no backbone to hold The Sprout's (thanks, Molly Ivins!) feet to the fire in terms of obeying the Constitution, neither does it have the degree of nutball monomania required to impeach a judge for such evident Constitutional common sense. I doubt there's a single Representative crazy enough to... belay that, there aren't enough crazies there to make it a serious possibility.
Writers (good ones, anyways) understand this; sooner or later, the pool of dramatic possibilities for any set of characters and situations runs dry. Good writers bring the story to some form of closure, leave it behind, and go on to other plots/settings/characters. Studios are constitutionally incapable of understanding this dramatic reality ('cause they're not in the business of telling stories, just in the business of maximizing income); they insist on The Next Generation or Son Of Shrek 5 or The Phantom Menace or Rocky 17 or whatever sorry drivel, because there is still a pool of interest in the story, which eventually dries up as the third or fourth variation on "Alien Virus Infects Starship Crew And Makes Them Act Weird/Change Allegiance/Crumble Into Powder..." wrings the last cent out of the franchise and wrings moans or yawns from the declining fan base.
Either the story line comes to a conclusion, or the story line dribbles to a halt as the ideas run out. A. Conan Doyle recognized that, that's why he threw Holmes off a cliff. Agatha Christie recognized it and offed Hercule Poirot (although that may well have been more for dog-in-the-manger reasons).
To prevent the ISP from messing with one's e-mails (like, say, rewriting or blocking them in transit) before the mail server can send them (assumes that, as in the case of Gmail, the mail provider isn't the same company as the ISP).
Of course, that seems a bit farfetched to me, but then having the ISP doing deep packet inspection on one's e-mail traffic seems a bit weird, too.
The impossibility here is not that ODF is incapable of rendering MS Office content properly; if MS wanted that to happen, it WOULD. (MS, after all, is in the best position of anyone to map their proprietary stuff to ODF and vice versa).
No, the problem here is NOT technical, it's ideological. The feature that Microsoft wants is user lock-in. The essential feature for MS is that THEY control the standard document format, and exclude all others from adequately rendering that format, keeping essentially all users as a captive market. This is more than adequately demonstrated by an objective examination of MS' public comments, their corporate conduct during this debate, and their private intentions as evidenced by the Halloween memos. For that matter, simply look at their corporate conduct over their whole history, and ask if it's ever changed for the better.
"krgu" in the above post should have rendered as "kregu", where the "e" is actually a non-latin character -- an "e" with a tail below it. Not that anyone will actually search for that title, but it's best to provide accurate info where possible...
A *very* interesting account of the Enigma's history from a postwar Polish perspective, translated in East Germany (I got my copy from the gift shop at the Rundfunkmuseum in Nuremberg). This is a translation from the Polish original.
German Translation: "Im Banne Der Enigma" (Under The Spell Of The Enigma) Original title: "W krgu Enigmy", published in Warsaw in 1979 Author: Wladyslaw Kozaczuk
Translation published by: Militärverlag der Deutschen Demokratischen Republik (translator's name not listed) ISBN 3-327-00423-4
In addition to its rather interesting political perspective, the book has an extremely detailed account of the Polish Intelligence Service's work on Enigma, including material I'd not seen in most of the more accessible Western literature on Enigma. In essence, the Polish crypto boffins had Enigma cracked (including automated cracking machines) before the war even started, but lacked the resources to scale up their efforts as the machines were upgraded (addition of the plugboard and new rotors); that, and the German occupation of Poland and later France, led them to share their findings with Britain, and the history most folks hear about.
BTW, WRT the "Enigma-E" electronic Enigma machine, I highly recommend it. I still get a kick out of decrypting messages with the one I built (in its nifty wooden case). Well worth the cost for those who've gotten the "Enigma virus".
To quote Bruce Schneier, "Making bits not copyable is like trying to make water not wet." I dunno 'bout those Doom9 guys, but I know enough of Bruce Schneier's work to trust his opinion on this one. I don't know what the digital-media landscape will look like when all this settles out, but I *don't* think it'll be neatly and unbreakably wrapped in DRM containers with price tags on.
While it's useful to know the exact legal status of the vouchers and GPLv3 implications, let's not lose sight of the more important issue here. This whole MS-Novell agreement was, on MS' part (and, IMHO, that's all that matters here; Novell's motives are very secondary), intended to frighten users away from "wild" versions of Linux through the phantasm of patent litigation, and corral them into using only versions distributed by MS "partners," either in order to extract a Microsoft tax or generally suppress Linux adoption.
The critical aspect of the vouchers controversy is not whether MS is definitely bound by the GPL to refrain from patent litigation against corporate Linux users;the critical aspect is, How does this affect the perceptions of the potential victims, er, customers? If you consider the potential for the voucher-and-GPLv3 combination to defuse MS' patent threats in any possible litigation, together with the refusal of most Linux distributors to play along with MS, the net FUD effect of MS' patent-threat campaign would seem to be significantly diminished. THAT, I submit, is the critical factor in this whole circus.
There's NO impropriety or unclean hands there...
on
SCO Vs. IBM Leaks Exposed
·
· Score: 3, Informative
SCO is accusing PJ of receiving legal docs filed in the case from IBM. Weeeell, aside from the serious doubtfulness that this actually happened (GrokLaw has several volunteers who visit the courthouse and pick up hardcopies, which sometimes can even lack the usual court-clerk stamp - clerks being fallible humans too) the documents SCO mentions are not sealed, hence are PUBLIC RECORDS. Thus, there's no misconduct whatever involved in a party to the case giving non-sealed filings to a journalist, blogger, or passerby on the street. (Incidentally, journalists DO try to get early copies of such filings from the parties so they can be the first to report the news; this is completely legitimate for nonpriveleged material, as it becomes public record anyway.)
Now, when it comes to a party (SCO) allegedly giving SEALED material to a nonparty (Maureen O'Gara), that's another, entirely smellier, kettle of fish. That WOULD be improper.
He says Linux isn't open because every time he opens his mouth and says something really, really stupid, everyone calls him an idiot and tells him to shut up.
From all I've seen and read, this is spot on. Enderle isn't much of a journalist.
Now, IMHO, the REAL trouble with Linux in the eyes of his sponsors (yes, I think he is shilling) is that nasty old GPL. Whether you call it Free Software or Open Source, software built under this conceptual model is a disruptive technology that is inexorably changing the software developers' ecosystem. Unless you make something that is truly unique in what it does, community-developed software at $0 or so is competing with your proprietary products in an increasingly effective manner. In the long run, this is good for software users overall, but really tough on commercial software developers who are invested in The Old Ways. That's why these FUD attacks happen. Of course, in the long run, there's no way the old-model businesses can stop this trend, but as with lots of digital trends these days, we're in for a rough ride along the way.
On a project I was doing between 2 and 5 years ago, while still using the corporate install of MacAfee (sp?) AV, the curst thing ALWAYS flagged TAR archives as virus-laden. Now, these were built on and for a Solaris system (and combined with documents generated on Windows, for those inclined to wonder how Solaris comes into this), and usually contained NO binary executables, just Perl scripts and text data files. Customer "support" was nonexistent.
I've since had other problems with Norton AV, which bogs my system egregiously (sometimes I think the malware would be less burdensome!). (45 seconds to get a right-click menu to come up on a desktop icon with NO programs running? Yecch!)
It's most unfortunate that the manufacturers of this crapware can wreak such havoc on application developers...
Indie game designers, here's an idea: Write that hot new game for Linux and release it as a bootable LiveCD using the Linux distro of your choice. Runs on allkinda hardware (even that crufty old pre-Vista stuff still choking the basements and game rooms of the world), avoids the performance penalty of running Vista (Hoo-boy! More system resources for the game to use!), and allows you to know EXACTLY what the operating system is and what video drivers and other critical system resources are running, so you can concentrate on the game. No worries about "Did MS break our game with the last patch?" or the like. OS compatibility gets very simple. Hardware compatibility is simplified, too: games normally only need CPU, video, network, some disk, and keyboard/mouse/game controller.
True, there are complications to this strategy, notably in terms of network setups, video settings, custom or updated drivers, savegames, and other persistent data that users will want to have on hand, but these are all resolvable in relatively simple ways. Build a Windows "setup" utility that sets up a directory on the user's existing disk partitions for use by the LiveCD, and/or provide a USB flash drive for persistent data storage. The USB key can even be used as a physical license key, as some of them have built-in crypto.
This obviously isn't THE solution for game designers who don't want to kowtow to Microsoft, but it IS a WORKABLE and PRACTICAL solution, and it does have advantages that make it attractive.
So, if Novell is distributing under a nontransferable "patent umbrella license" from MS, wouldn't that put them in violation of the GPL3 with any GPL3-licensed package they were to distribute? That's the crux of the whole GPL3 issue, IIRC; that Novell would need to do its own support and updates under GPL2 'cause they couldn't distribute anything under GPL3 and still offer the "patent protection." I don't seem to recall there being any wiggle room in that deal for Novell to distribute Open Source software outside the "umbrella," and that's the only way they could still be in compliance.
I worked at a company acquired by GE; we were ALL required to take a mandatory all-day *ethics training course*. Mine was held the Friday before the story about Jack Welch's unbelievably lavish and hitherto entirely secret "retirement package" (personal use of a corporate 747, his own apartment in Trump Towers including catered food and flowers, and much else, all of it lifelong and irrevocable except with Mr. Welch's consent) hit the press. You might say I felt somewhat betrayed by this...
Immelt, the CEO of GE, tried to portray this as all being perfectly fine and appropriate, and not at all excessive. Once the public outrage got too hot, the board hurriedly rescinded this platinum handshake and claimed "All fixed now, no ethical issues at all. Nothing to see here, folks, move along."
Let's see, I get punished if I don't fly the very cheapest route on company travel, regardless of the cost to my personal life, and a retired exec gets FREE use of a WHOLE 747 for his PERSONAL use whenever he feels like it? And THAT is considered ethical conduct?
Unlicensed radio systems (like the garage door openers, ALL your WiFi gear, your car keyfob, etc etc, but NOT, IIRC, cell phones) operate under "FCC Part 15," widely mentioned elsewhere in this discussion. The important point in this regard is that ALL Part 15 devices operate subject to two inflexible rules: 1) you can't interfere with licensed users, and 2) it's your bad luck if licensed users interfere with you.
Unless a manufacturer of wireless gadgets wants to require every user to get a license (not an option for most gear), there is basically NO way to avoid the Part 15 restrictions; licensed users (emergency services, licensed commercial radio systems, and militery users) will always trump nonlicensed users. It won't happen often, but when it does, ya just gotta live with it.
Is my Samba server that's been running in a back room for two years, and only ever gets rebooted when the power's out long enough to drain the UPS (which has happened maybe twice during that time.) Didn't even need a reboot when we changed its IP address. Did I mention it's had NO problems since being initially configured?
That is really the greatest threat to open source software from software patents: the fact that it is substantially easier to determine if an open source package is infringing. In a litigious environment, it's easy to say, "why take the risk?"
Another reason this is wrong: Most Open Source development projects have no millions of dollars a litigious patentholder r greddy patent troll could sue for. Sue a commercial software vendor over a closed-source app, and you can bleed them for a significant sum of money, plus there's a single point of supply for the product that can easily be shut down; with an Open Source project, you could maybe make back a fraction of your legal costs, and you'd have to sue ALL THE USERS, too, in addition to trying to take down every mirrored set of project source code. This makes an Open Source project a MUCH less attractive litigation target than a commercial firm.
The only visible exception to the above analysis is Microsoft, who can be expected to try to wield patents as an anticompetitive weapon to maintain their monopoly -- and I think the sleeping antitrust watchdogs might find that a bit hard to ignore, overlook, or wink at in the end.
Sounds like another silly patent on something obvious and common; the relevant question is, was it obvious and common in 2000 when the application was filed, or was it really original and novel at that time?
It seems unlikely that it was really novel then, but I don't actually know for sure.
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The best bet here is that the Novell monies (per the court judgement, this is money belonging to Novell and illegally "converted" [i.e., stolen] by SCO) are not subject to the bankruptcy process; instead, Novell gets to recover that amount before the Chapter 11 reorganization. It seems logical for the bankruptcy judge to either allow the Utah court to establish the amount of that judgement, or simply declare "It all belongs to Novell," before proceeding with a reorganization, given that the Novell judgement is what tips SCO into the bin.
So, my $.02 is on Novell being unconditionally awarded the judgement in the amount determined Real Soon Now by one of the two courts ahead of the Chapter 11 process, and there being nothing left for SCO and its other creditors but scorchmarks.
Your .sig reminds me of an old chestnut:
No weapon of the enemy's is as dangerous as one of your own second lieutenants armed with a map and compass. (From Murphy's Laws of Combat, I believe, though I'm probably mangling the quote.)
Device manufacturers, especially the cheap ones, tend to use cheap/quick/easy chipsets that often have Windows-targeted reference drivers, or they cobble their own. NOT all of these work at all well (I've had endless problems with cheap USB drives gagging a Win98 box 'cause their legacy drivers are crap.) But, the Windows monopoly has meant that there's immense Windows-centric inertia in low-end commodity peripherals.
This will slowly change as Linux gains desktop traction and Vista drives users toward The Penguin. It *will* happen, Linux support WILL improve, but it will take a while to become easily available. There are many forces pushing Linux adoption forward, it'll just be a while before it becomes embarrassing for a vendor to NOT provide Linux support.
1. Take large sheet of tinfoil
2. Wrap that sucker up like a ham-and-Limburger sandwich
3. Explain to the nice folks at the X-ray machine why that suspicious package is your iPhone
4. Be unable to get emergency calls from your family at home while on your Mediterranean cruise
Of course, there's always the simple, brute-force power-down solution: the iHammer. (Can you tell how unimpressed I am with this overpriced, overhyped gewgaw?)
Although I will admit that the clomping noises those wooden shoes make as they dance CAN get a bit overwhelming...
What's that? You mean those are CLOGGERS? Oh, that's different, nevermind.
Federal judges have life tenure unless impeached by Congress for misconduct, and while this Congress has no backbone to hold The Sprout's (thanks, Molly Ivins!) feet to the fire in terms of obeying the Constitution, neither does it have the degree of nutball monomania required to impeach a judge for such evident Constitutional common sense. I doubt there's a single Representative crazy enough to ... belay that, there aren't enough crazies there to make it a serious possibility.
Writers (good ones, anyways) understand this; sooner or later, the pool of dramatic possibilities for any set of characters and situations runs dry. Good writers bring the story to some form of closure, leave it behind, and go on to other plots/settings/characters. Studios are constitutionally incapable of understanding this dramatic reality ('cause they're not in the business of telling stories, just in the business of maximizing income); they insist on The Next Generation or Son Of Shrek 5 or The Phantom Menace or Rocky 17 or whatever sorry drivel, because there is still a pool of interest in the story, which eventually dries up as the third or fourth variation on "Alien Virus Infects Starship Crew And Makes Them Act Weird/Change Allegiance/Crumble Into Powder..." wrings the last cent out of the franchise and wrings moans or yawns from the declining fan base.
Either the story line comes to a conclusion, or the story line dribbles to a halt as the ideas run out. A. Conan Doyle recognized that, that's why he threw Holmes off a cliff. Agatha Christie recognized it and offed Hercule Poirot (although that may well have been more for dog-in-the-manger reasons).
To prevent the ISP from messing with one's e-mails (like, say, rewriting or blocking them in transit) before the mail server can send them (assumes that, as in the case of Gmail, the mail provider isn't the same company as the ISP).
Of course, that seems a bit farfetched to me, but then having the ISP doing deep packet inspection on one's e-mail traffic seems a bit weird, too.
Sort of decent (once appropriately "declawed") if funky-looking piece of hardware, brain-dead business model.
The impossibility here is not that ODF is incapable of rendering MS Office content properly; if MS wanted that to happen, it WOULD. (MS, after all, is in the best position of anyone to map their proprietary stuff to ODF and vice versa).
No, the problem here is NOT technical, it's ideological. The feature that Microsoft wants is user lock-in. The essential feature for MS is that THEY control the standard document format, and exclude all others from adequately rendering that format, keeping essentially all users as a captive market. This is more than adequately demonstrated by an objective examination of MS' public comments, their corporate conduct during this debate, and their private intentions as evidenced by the Halloween memos. For that matter, simply look at their corporate conduct over their whole history, and ask if it's ever changed for the better.
"krgu" in the above post should have rendered as "kregu", where the "e" is actually a non-latin character -- an "e" with a tail below it. Not that anyone will actually search for that title, but it's best to provide accurate info where possible...
A *very* interesting account of the Enigma's history from a postwar Polish perspective, translated in East Germany (I got my copy from the gift shop at the Rundfunkmuseum in Nuremberg). This is a translation from the Polish original.
German Translation: "Im Banne Der Enigma" (Under The Spell Of The Enigma)
Original title: "W krgu Enigmy", published in Warsaw in 1979
Author: Wladyslaw Kozaczuk
Translation published by: Militärverlag der Deutschen Demokratischen Republik
(translator's name not listed)
ISBN 3-327-00423-4
In addition to its rather interesting political perspective, the book has an extremely detailed account of the Polish Intelligence Service's work on Enigma, including material I'd not seen in most of the more accessible Western literature on Enigma. In essence, the Polish crypto boffins had Enigma cracked (including automated cracking machines) before the war even started, but lacked the resources to scale up their efforts as the machines were upgraded (addition of the plugboard and new rotors); that, and the German occupation of Poland and later France, led them to share their findings with Britain, and the history most folks hear about.
BTW, WRT the "Enigma-E" electronic Enigma machine, I highly recommend it. I still get a kick out of decrypting messages with the one I built (in its nifty wooden case). Well worth the cost for those who've gotten the "Enigma virus".
In case you have to eat them.
To quote Bruce Schneier, "Making bits not copyable is like trying to make water not wet." I dunno 'bout those Doom9 guys, but I know enough of Bruce Schneier's work to trust his opinion on this one. I don't know what the digital-media landscape will look like when all this settles out, but I *don't* think it'll be neatly and unbreakably wrapped in DRM containers with price tags on.
While it's useful to know the exact legal status of the vouchers and GPLv3 implications, let's not lose sight of the more important issue here. This whole MS-Novell agreement was, on MS' part (and, IMHO, that's all that matters here; Novell's motives are very secondary), intended to frighten users away from "wild" versions of Linux through the phantasm of patent litigation, and corral them into using only versions distributed by MS "partners," either in order to extract a Microsoft tax or generally suppress Linux adoption.
The critical aspect of the vouchers controversy is not whether MS is definitely bound by the GPL to refrain from patent litigation against corporate Linux users;the critical aspect is, How does this affect the perceptions of the potential victims, er, customers? If you consider the potential for the voucher-and-GPLv3 combination to defuse MS' patent threats in any possible litigation, together with the refusal of most Linux distributors to play along with MS, the net FUD effect of MS' patent-threat campaign would seem to be significantly diminished. THAT, I submit, is the critical factor in this whole circus.
SCO is accusing PJ of receiving legal docs filed in the case from IBM. Weeeell, aside from the serious doubtfulness that this actually happened (GrokLaw has several volunteers who visit the courthouse and pick up hardcopies, which sometimes can even lack the usual court-clerk stamp - clerks being fallible humans too) the documents SCO mentions are not sealed, hence are PUBLIC RECORDS. Thus, there's no misconduct whatever involved in a party to the case giving non-sealed filings to a journalist, blogger, or passerby on the street. (Incidentally, journalists DO try to get early copies of such filings from the parties so they can be the first to report the news; this is completely legitimate for nonpriveleged material, as it becomes public record anyway.)
Now, when it comes to a party (SCO) allegedly giving SEALED material to a nonparty (Maureen O'Gara), that's another, entirely smellier, kettle of fish. That WOULD be improper.
He says Linux isn't open because every time he opens his mouth and says something really, really stupid, everyone calls him an idiot and tells him to shut up.
From all I've seen and read, this is spot on. Enderle isn't much of a journalist.
Now, IMHO, the REAL trouble with Linux in the eyes of his sponsors (yes, I think he is shilling) is that nasty old GPL. Whether you call it Free Software or Open Source, software built under this conceptual model is a disruptive technology that is inexorably changing the software developers' ecosystem. Unless you make something that is truly unique in what it does, community-developed software at $0 or so is competing with your proprietary products in an increasingly effective manner. In the long run, this is good for software users overall, but really tough on commercial software developers who are invested in The Old Ways. That's why these FUD attacks happen. Of course, in the long run, there's no way the old-model businesses can stop this trend, but as with lots of digital trends these days, we're in for a rough ride along the way.
On a project I was doing between 2 and 5 years ago, while still using the corporate install of MacAfee (sp?) AV, the curst thing ALWAYS flagged TAR archives as virus-laden. Now, these were built on and for a Solaris system (and combined with documents generated on Windows, for those inclined to wonder how Solaris comes into this), and usually contained NO binary executables, just Perl scripts and text data files. Customer "support" was nonexistent.
I've since had other problems with Norton AV, which bogs my system egregiously (sometimes I think the malware would be less burdensome!). (45 seconds to get a right-click menu to come up on a desktop icon with NO programs running? Yecch!)
It's most unfortunate that the manufacturers of this crapware can wreak such havoc on application developers...
Yeah, but it WILL ruin a good screwdriver, so use a cheap, WELL_INSULATED one instead.
Indie game designers, here's an idea: Write that hot new game for Linux and release it as a bootable LiveCD using the Linux distro of your choice. Runs on allkinda hardware (even that crufty old pre-Vista stuff still choking the basements and game rooms of the world), avoids the performance penalty of running Vista (Hoo-boy! More system resources for the game to use!), and allows you to know EXACTLY what the operating system is and what video drivers and other critical system resources are running, so you can concentrate on the game. No worries about "Did MS break our game with the last patch?" or the like. OS compatibility gets very simple. Hardware compatibility is simplified, too: games normally only need CPU, video, network, some disk, and keyboard/mouse/game controller.
True, there are complications to this strategy, notably in terms of network setups, video settings, custom or updated drivers, savegames, and other persistent data that users will want to have on hand, but these are all resolvable in relatively simple ways. Build a Windows "setup" utility that sets up a directory on the user's existing disk partitions for use by the LiveCD, and/or provide a USB flash drive for persistent data storage. The USB key can even be used as a physical license key, as some of them have built-in crypto.
This obviously isn't THE solution for game designers who don't want to kowtow to Microsoft, but it IS a WORKABLE and PRACTICAL solution, and it does have advantages that make it attractive.
So, if Novell is distributing under a nontransferable "patent umbrella license" from MS, wouldn't that put them in violation of the GPL3 with any GPL3-licensed package they were to distribute? That's the crux of the whole GPL3 issue, IIRC; that Novell would need to do its own support and updates under GPL2 'cause they couldn't distribute anything under GPL3 and still offer the "patent protection." I don't seem to recall there being any wiggle room in that deal for Novell to distribute Open Source software outside the "umbrella," and that's the only way they could still be in compliance.
I worked at a company acquired by GE; we were ALL required to take a mandatory all-day *ethics training course*. Mine was held the Friday before the story about Jack Welch's unbelievably lavish and hitherto entirely secret "retirement package" (personal use of a corporate 747, his own apartment in Trump Towers including catered food and flowers, and much else, all of it lifelong and irrevocable except with Mr. Welch's consent) hit the press. You might say I felt somewhat betrayed by this...
Immelt, the CEO of GE, tried to portray this as all being perfectly fine and appropriate, and not at all excessive. Once the public outrage got too hot, the board hurriedly rescinded this platinum handshake and claimed "All fixed now, no ethical issues at all. Nothing to see here, folks, move along."
Let's see, I get punished if I don't fly the very cheapest route on company travel, regardless of the cost to my personal life, and a retired exec gets FREE use of a WHOLE 747 for his PERSONAL use whenever he feels like it? And THAT is considered ethical conduct?
That's MY beef with Mr. Immelt. Any questions?
Unlicensed radio systems (like the garage door openers, ALL your WiFi gear, your car keyfob, etc etc, but NOT, IIRC, cell phones) operate under "FCC Part 15," widely mentioned elsewhere in this discussion. The important point in this regard is that ALL Part 15 devices operate subject to two inflexible rules: 1) you can't interfere with licensed users, and 2) it's your bad luck if licensed users interfere with you.
Unless a manufacturer of wireless gadgets wants to require every user to get a license (not an option for most gear), there is basically NO way to avoid the Part 15 restrictions; licensed users (emergency services, licensed commercial radio systems, and militery users) will always trump nonlicensed users. It won't happen often, but when it does, ya just gotta live with it.
Is my Samba server that's been running in a back room for two years, and only ever gets rebooted when the power's out long enough to drain the UPS (which has happened maybe twice during that time.) Didn't even need a reboot when we changed its IP address. Did I mention it's had NO problems since being initially configured?
Parent poster has it dead on about uptime...
That is really the greatest threat to open source software from software patents: the fact that it is substantially easier to determine if an open source package is infringing. In a litigious environment, it's easy to say, "why take the risk?"
Another reason this is wrong: Most Open Source development projects have no millions of dollars a litigious patentholder r greddy patent troll could sue for. Sue a commercial software vendor over a closed-source app, and you can bleed them for a significant sum of money, plus there's a single point of supply for the product that can easily be shut down; with an Open Source project, you could maybe make back a fraction of your legal costs, and you'd have to sue ALL THE USERS, too, in addition to trying to take down every mirrored set of project source code. This makes an Open Source project a MUCH less attractive litigation target than a commercial firm.
The only visible exception to the above analysis is Microsoft, who can be expected to try to wield patents as an anticompetitive weapon to maintain their monopoly -- and I think the sleeping antitrust watchdogs might find that a bit hard to ignore, overlook, or wink at in the end.
Sounds like another silly patent on something obvious and common; the relevant question is, was it obvious and common in 2000 when the application was filed, or was it really original and novel at that time?
It seems unlikely that it was really novel then, but I don't actually know for sure.