And, I hate to say it but I rather think lots of people are wrong.
The few who have basically said "because they can get away with it" - congratulations.
From the tone of your post (mentioning prices in $), I'm assuming you're in the US. Which is a bit of a shame because these people have just opened up with a view to putting the proverbial cat among the pigeons. Maybe you know someone in the UK who can post a hearing aid on to you?
Normally whoever is paying the bills for a losing cause would stop. In this situation the legal money is going to Darl's brother so IMHO the corpse of SCO is getting milked to the max for the McBride families benefit. It was never about linux. IBM was just a convenient brick wall to drive the company into to get an excuse to funnel the money out of SCO.
I strongly doubt that.
The reason I doubt it is I don't believe SCO's business held any significant value. Caldera Linux was around at a time when Linux distributions were ten a penny, and many of the companies behind those distributions have since gone to the wall. Theirs offered nothing new.
When they bought the rights to the SCO brand name and the Unix business from what is now Tarantella, they were buying a Unix OS which runs on x86 commodity hardware but had far more particular hardware requirements compared with Linux, fewer features and a reputation for being downright hostile to even relatively seasoned Unix admins. Lots of companies with SCO-based systems were looking seriously at Linux-based alternatives.
The obvious thing for Caldera/SCO to do would have been to write a compatibility layer for Linux allowing applications compiled for SCO to run unmodified under Linux (handy for customers who bought their application software years ago and source code may no longer be available), and then punted this as an upgrade path to what few SCO Unix users remained. This would have given them a solid base of customers to start with which they could then build on.
Instead they announced that Linux contained masses of code stolen from Unix (a claim which they must have known was false because they had access to all the evidence to demonstrate this one way or another) and started suing anyone they could think of - on at least one occasion, this involved a former customer. (Great advert for your business there, guys. "Stick with us or we'll sue you!")
I can honestly only come up with two logical reasons for this:
1. McBride has a serious addiction to crack cocaine. I've lived with crackheads, it's not a pretty sight. They seem to think all sorts of odd things are sensible.
2. There was an ulterior motive behind all the suing.
While 1. is tempting to believe, I find 2. rather more compelling. McBride's too clean cut to be a crackhead.
(Disclosure: I am a Linux sysadmin and the company I work for has - right now - precisely zero backend infrastructure running Windows)
This is typical of the kind of comment which gets modded up to 5 almost immediately.
It's also utterly ignorant of current issues.
The traditional file infector virus where you have to run the infected application to get infected yourself is all but dead. It's far more common for a modern virus to be spread by an infected email, a drive-by download exploiting either the browser or a plugin or worm-like techniques once behind the firewall. Frequently they are able to account for running under an account with reduced privileges and either use a local exploit to gain admin privs or simply live with reduced privileges - you don't need an enormous number of privileges to scan through a user's home directory and forward anything that looks interesting to a remote server. And they don't take over the computer so obviously (eg. slow it to a crawl and make attempts to browse to mcafee.com magically stop working) that any fool could see there is something wrong.
There is nothing intrinsic to Windows which makes client software more susceptible to these things - or, for that matter, that makes client software in Linux less susceptible. About the only real difference is that Linux admins have known for years that the only way to trust a system that's been compromised is to wipe it and start again.
If you take a pragmatic view, 99% of the record label/artist contracts are nowhere near as likely to favour the artist. Sure, they may lose the odd battle but in the big scheme of things, it's still worth lobbying for eternal copyrights.
Because there's a buffer between the student's fees and the professor's wages called the university and the university will sure as hell notice if the failure rate for that course is unusually high.
Stuff gets written down with little or no thought so it can be studied later
Which is precisely what the lecturer doesn't want. You're much more likely to understand if you listen to what they say, try and understand it and then write abbreviated notes in your own words than if you mindlessly commit words to paper.
It's difficult to stuff a paper ballot box (which in most systems is never to be left unattended from when it's sealed to when the votes get counted) without it being fairly obvious.
OTOH, there are plenty of places to hide an electronic vote stuffer on most electronic systems and it's a often a lot harder to verify that nobody's tampered with them.
Your client has something with potential value that many dot-com companies didn't - his patent portfolio.
He still has to identify one or more patents that might have potential and set up a business based around using those patents.
Contrast that to companies with ideas which amounted to "We'll sell on the internet. We'll do better than everyone else because unlike a bricks & mortar store, we have a potential market of 6 billion people (oh, except those without Internet access. And those who can't read English because we're not planning on running a website in many different languages. And we're not going to ship outside the US.)"
They overlooked minor issues like price - many were selling commodity items which it's virtually impossible to compete with major supermarkets on because they are big enough to buy direct from the manufacturer. Also minor issues like delivery - not everyone has an employer that will let them take a delivery of a sack of dog food in the middle of the day, and few people will take a day off for such a delivery. And issues like convenience - it isn't particularly convenient to buy one item online when you still need to go down to the supermarket to do your weekly shop, particularly when the item(s) on offer can be purchased just as easily from the supermarket.
They wound up with a business which not only operated at a stinking loss, it was never likely to operate at a profit. Who in their right mind wants to buy a business which is never likely to turn a profit? At least with something like YouTube they have a product lots of advertisers want (enormous numbers of visitors), and Google has a remarkable talent for turning enormous numbers of visitors into real money out of advertising.
"Get bought out" is not a business plan, it's an exit plan.
A business plan is "I'm going to do X, Y and Z. It will cost N (expenditure and arithmetic to prove it) and produce a product which can be sold for A (show arithmetic to prove it). Selling this product B number of times per week (show arithmetic to demonstrate this is realistic) will generate a gross profit of C. Heck, even if I only sell this product (B/2) times per week I'll cover my costs.
Competitors include Rod, Jane and Freddy - all of whom are making strong profits, which proves that in principle that such a business can work. But I'm better than all of them because my costs will be lower and I don't smell of old socks."
Getting paid doesn't necessarily mean getting paid enough to 1. take a week off one's day job and 2. pay for round-trip airfare.
At this point it would probably be substantially cheaper, quicker and easier to post them a prepaid 3G dongle and deal remotely using a proper remote support tool.
Though if they're on dialup it's possible they live in the back end of beyond, in which case there may not be a 3G signal.
If you still have a web app which doesn't display well in most HTML rendering engines, you should be shot. Any organisation which is still stuck on IE6 is unlikely to be forward-thinking enough to care about the iPad anyway.
Yeah, I'm a smug bastard. And any Fedora release certainly ships with more bugs than any OSX release. But dammit, it's nice to be able to fix stuff when it breaks, instead of staring mutely like an ape at some smooth, sealed, non-user-serviceable $700 white plastic brick.
I used to use Linux on the desktop, and it was after one too many nights like the one you've described that I said "Enough!" and bought myself a smooth, sealed, non-user-serviceable white plastic brick. This was just over four years ago.
It hasn't broken since. And even if it had, you know something? I've spent too much of my life fixing one configuration only to find another is also broken. Frankly, I'd rather replace broken hardware, reinstall the OS and reload from the last Time Machine backup than dick around trying to figure out what's wrong. My solution requires considerably less input from me 80% of the time, and is a surefire guaranteed fix 100% of the time.
Indeed - the last time I checked you can still compile in support for MFM hard disks in a recent 2.6 kernel.
I'm not sure there is any such thing as a computer physically capable of running a 2.6 kernel any quicker than "might just about boot before the heat death of the universe, but don't expect it to do anything useful" and a controller which can be plugged into said PC, but the functionality's there if you need it.
No no, it didn't seem safe at the time. Everyone who didn't have their head inside their kiester knew it was a gaping security hole.
Golly, I wish some of those people worked at Microsoft.
That's partly because Microsoft (and, by extension, a large chunk of the worlds' Windows software developers) have taken the approach that a PC is only ever used by one person who generally speaking knows what they want the computer to do and can be trusted to do the right thing when the situation demands it - despite decades of experience to the contrary.
To be fair, this attitude has become much less prevalent in their products since XP became the mainstream version of Windows, and even less so with the introduction of UAC in Vista. But this is Windows '95 we're talking about.
Appart from the wooshing sound refereed by a sibling post I would like to correct you:
The UK closes down around 17:00 GMT. After 5:00pm the only thing you will find open are mainly pubs.
Probably closer to about 5:30 pm, but other than that more-or-less true.
The big joke is that there are still a fair number of small, independent shops, many of which:
A: Sell products which appeal to people with a fair bit of disposable income. (ie. people who are almost certainly at work during the week)
B: Can't for the life of them understand why they are losing out to supermarkets (typically open until 20:00 - 22:00) or out of town shopping centres (typically open until 20:00 at least one day per week, frequently more).
By that definition Sun did this with Java about 15 years ago and IBM has been doing this with VM since 1972.
Anyone impressed by this "new, ground breaking technology" from Microsoft should immediately cancel their Slashdot account and tear up their geek membership card.
I dunno. Microsoft finally catching up with the rest of the world is most certainly news.
It'll be even more newsworthy when they do so in a fashion that isn't completely half-assed.
Even shows the code loaded into Visual Studio. He's not talking to "consumers". And since when did Microsoft ever claim, even to consumers, that all there OSes were the same on all devices? Consumers couldn't care less about whether a phone OS is the same as a PC OS.
Technically Microsoft haven't claimed that it was the same OS on all devices.
They've used a similar name for totally different products and let ignorant tech "journalists" (if you can call them journalists) do the rest. Though I note they haven't exactly gone out of their way to correct these tech "journalists".
More than one indie developer has commented that Mac users seem to be far more willing to buy software and less likely to pirate it. So much so that the percentage of buyers who use a Mac is far more than one might reasonably expect given their market share.
So you actually think MS should be responsible for pushing out 3rd party application updates? Unreasonable indeed...
They don't need to be. It would be enough to provide an API which lets applications register for updates, complete with public-key support to check signatures.
It doesn't get much better when you're looking at software which was actually designed to be used by a technical person. It amazes me how few Windows developers appear to have heard of such concepts as log files - or for that matter the event log.
I cannot express how frustrating it is to watch people who have spent their lives on Windows trying to solve problems by carrying out one random task, seeing if that helped, carrying out another random task, seeing if that helped, lather rinse and repeat.
You are aware that the anti-hero, Alex, liked Beethoven?
He was reprogrammed - brainwashed, if you like - to find violence abhorrent by showing him films of violent acts. A side effect of this brainwashing was that he also found the background music used in these films abhorrent. And the music used was his favourite - Beethoven.
If you enjoyed the film, read the book. It's.... rather darker, if such a thing were possible.
Slashdot Mirror
And, I hate to say it but I rather think lots of people are wrong.
The few who have basically said "because they can get away with it" - congratulations.
From the tone of your post (mentioning prices in $), I'm assuming you're in the US. Which is a bit of a shame because these people have just opened up with a view to putting the proverbial cat among the pigeons. Maybe you know someone in the UK who can post a hearing aid on to you?
Normally whoever is paying the bills for a losing cause would stop. In this situation the legal money is going to Darl's brother so IMHO the corpse of SCO is getting milked to the max for the McBride families benefit.
It was never about linux. IBM was just a convenient brick wall to drive the company into to get an excuse to funnel the money out of SCO.
I strongly doubt that.
The reason I doubt it is I don't believe SCO's business held any significant value. Caldera Linux was around at a time when Linux distributions were ten a penny, and many of the companies behind those distributions have since gone to the wall. Theirs offered nothing new.
When they bought the rights to the SCO brand name and the Unix business from what is now Tarantella, they were buying a Unix OS which runs on x86 commodity hardware but had far more particular hardware requirements compared with Linux, fewer features and a reputation for being downright hostile to even relatively seasoned Unix admins. Lots of companies with SCO-based systems were looking seriously at Linux-based alternatives.
The obvious thing for Caldera/SCO to do would have been to write a compatibility layer for Linux allowing applications compiled for SCO to run unmodified under Linux (handy for customers who bought their application software years ago and source code may no longer be available), and then punted this as an upgrade path to what few SCO Unix users remained. This would have given them a solid base of customers to start with which they could then build on.
Instead they announced that Linux contained masses of code stolen from Unix (a claim which they must have known was false because they had access to all the evidence to demonstrate this one way or another) and started suing anyone they could think of - on at least one occasion, this involved a former customer. (Great advert for your business there, guys. "Stick with us or we'll sue you!")
I can honestly only come up with two logical reasons for this:
1. McBride has a serious addiction to crack cocaine. I've lived with crackheads, it's not a pretty sight. They seem to think all sorts of odd things are sensible.
2. There was an ulterior motive behind all the suing.
While 1. is tempting to believe, I find 2. rather more compelling. McBride's too clean cut to be a crackhead.
(Disclosure: I am a Linux sysadmin and the company I work for has - right now - precisely zero backend infrastructure running Windows)
This is typical of the kind of comment which gets modded up to 5 almost immediately.
It's also utterly ignorant of current issues.
The traditional file infector virus where you have to run the infected application to get infected yourself is all but dead. It's far more common for a modern virus to be spread by an infected email, a drive-by download exploiting either the browser or a plugin or worm-like techniques once behind the firewall. Frequently they are able to account for running under an account with reduced privileges and either use a local exploit to gain admin privs or simply live with reduced privileges - you don't need an enormous number of privileges to scan through a user's home directory and forward anything that looks interesting to a remote server. And they don't take over the computer so obviously (eg. slow it to a crawl and make attempts to browse to mcafee.com magically stop working) that any fool could see there is something wrong.
There is nothing intrinsic to Windows which makes client software more susceptible to these things - or, for that matter, that makes client software in Linux less susceptible. About the only real difference is that Linux admins have known for years that the only way to trust a system that's been compromised is to wipe it and start again.
While I concede it's unlikely anyone would actively look for such a thing - let alone find it - if they do you have a problem.
Previously, you were Just Another Passenger.
Now, you are A Passenger Who Has An Item Obviously Designed to Hide Something Right Under Somebody's Nose.
If that doesn't attract further interest, I don't know what will. I think the "take it out and plug it into your phone" suggestion was better.
Not sure it'll make much difference.
If you take a pragmatic view, 99% of the record label/artist contracts are nowhere near as likely to favour the artist. Sure, they may lose the odd battle but in the big scheme of things, it's still worth lobbying for eternal copyrights.
It's about on par with Jif.
Why on Earth are you drinking bath cleaner?
Because there's a buffer between the student's fees and the professor's wages called the university and the university will sure as hell notice if the failure rate for that course is unusually high.
Stuff gets written down with little or no thought so it can be studied later
Which is precisely what the lecturer doesn't want. You're much more likely to understand if you listen to what they say, try and understand it and then write abbreviated notes in your own words than if you mindlessly commit words to paper.
It's difficult to stuff a paper ballot box (which in most systems is never to be left unattended from when it's sealed to when the votes get counted) without it being fairly obvious.
OTOH, there are plenty of places to hide an electronic vote stuffer on most electronic systems and it's a often a lot harder to verify that nobody's tampered with them.
Your client has something with potential value that many dot-com companies didn't - his patent portfolio.
He still has to identify one or more patents that might have potential and set up a business based around using those patents.
Contrast that to companies with ideas which amounted to "We'll sell on the internet. We'll do better than everyone else because unlike a bricks & mortar store, we have a potential market of 6 billion people (oh, except those without Internet access. And those who can't read English because we're not planning on running a website in many different languages. And we're not going to ship outside the US.)"
They overlooked minor issues like price - many were selling commodity items which it's virtually impossible to compete with major supermarkets on because they are big enough to buy direct from the manufacturer. Also minor issues like delivery - not everyone has an employer that will let them take a delivery of a sack of dog food in the middle of the day, and few people will take a day off for such a delivery. And issues like convenience - it isn't particularly convenient to buy one item online when you still need to go down to the supermarket to do your weekly shop, particularly when the item(s) on offer can be purchased just as easily from the supermarket.
They wound up with a business which not only operated at a stinking loss, it was never likely to operate at a profit. Who in their right mind wants to buy a business which is never likely to turn a profit? At least with something like YouTube they have a product lots of advertisers want (enormous numbers of visitors), and Google has a remarkable talent for turning enormous numbers of visitors into real money out of advertising.
Most died a horrible death thereafter.
Which is precisely why I argue that "get bought out" is not a solid business plan.
At the very least, you need to have some idea what you're going to do to a company to make it worth being bought out.
"Get bought out" is not a business plan, it's an exit plan.
A business plan is "I'm going to do X, Y and Z. It will cost N (expenditure and arithmetic to prove it) and produce a product which can be sold for A (show arithmetic to prove it). Selling this product B number of times per week (show arithmetic to demonstrate this is realistic) will generate a gross profit of C. Heck, even if I only sell this product (B/2) times per week I'll cover my costs.
Competitors include Rod, Jane and Freddy - all of whom are making strong profits, which proves that in principle that such a business can work. But I'm better than all of them because my costs will be lower and I don't smell of old socks."
Getting paid doesn't necessarily mean getting paid enough to 1. take a week off one's day job and 2. pay for round-trip airfare.
At this point it would probably be substantially cheaper, quicker and easier to post them a prepaid 3G dongle and deal remotely using a proper remote support tool.
Though if they're on dialup it's possible they live in the back end of beyond, in which case there may not be a 3G signal.
If you still have a web app which doesn't display well in most HTML rendering engines, you should be shot. Any organisation which is still stuck on IE6 is unlikely to be forward-thinking enough to care about the iPad anyway.
Yeah, I'm a smug bastard. And any Fedora release certainly ships with more bugs than any OSX release. But dammit, it's nice to be able to fix stuff when it breaks, instead of staring mutely like an ape at some smooth, sealed, non-user-serviceable $700 white plastic brick.
I used to use Linux on the desktop, and it was after one too many nights like the one you've described that I said "Enough!" and bought myself a smooth, sealed, non-user-serviceable white plastic brick. This was just over four years ago.
It hasn't broken since. And even if it had, you know something? I've spent too much of my life fixing one configuration only to find another is also broken. Frankly, I'd rather replace broken hardware, reinstall the OS and reload from the last Time Machine backup than dick around trying to figure out what's wrong. My solution requires considerably less input from me 80% of the time, and is a surefire guaranteed fix 100% of the time.
Indeed - the last time I checked you can still compile in support for MFM hard disks in a recent 2.6 kernel.
I'm not sure there is any such thing as a computer physically capable of running a 2.6 kernel any quicker than "might just about boot before the heat death of the universe, but don't expect it to do anything useful" and a controller which can be plugged into said PC, but the functionality's there if you need it.
No no, it didn't seem safe at the time. Everyone who didn't have their head inside their kiester knew it was a gaping security hole.
Golly, I wish some of those people worked at Microsoft.
That's partly because Microsoft (and, by extension, a large chunk of the worlds' Windows software developers) have taken the approach that a PC is only ever used by one person who generally speaking knows what they want the computer to do and can be trusted to do the right thing when the situation demands it - despite decades of experience to the contrary.
To be fair, this attitude has become much less prevalent in their products since XP became the mainstream version of Windows, and even less so with the introduction of UAC in Vista. But this is Windows '95 we're talking about.
the UK closes down at around 2300 GMT
Appart from the wooshing sound refereed by a sibling post I would like to correct you:
The UK closes down around 17:00 GMT. After 5:00pm the only thing you will find open are mainly pubs.
Probably closer to about 5:30 pm, but other than that more-or-less true.
The big joke is that there are still a fair number of small, independent shops, many of which:
A: Sell products which appeal to people with a fair bit of disposable income. (ie. people who are almost certainly at work during the week)
B: Can't for the life of them understand why they are losing out to supermarkets (typically open until 20:00 - 22:00) or out of town shopping centres (typically open until 20:00 at least one day per week, frequently more).
By that definition Sun did this with Java about 15 years ago and IBM has been doing this with VM since 1972.
Anyone impressed by this "new, ground breaking technology" from Microsoft should immediately cancel their Slashdot account and tear up their geek membership card.
I dunno. Microsoft finally catching up with the rest of the world is most certainly news.
It'll be even more newsworthy when they do so in a fashion that isn't completely half-assed.
Even shows the code loaded into Visual Studio. He's not talking to "consumers". And since when did Microsoft ever claim, even to consumers, that all there OSes were the same on all devices? Consumers couldn't care less about whether a phone OS is the same as a PC OS.
Technically Microsoft haven't claimed that it was the same OS on all devices.
They've used a similar name for totally different products and let ignorant tech "journalists" (if you can call them journalists) do the rest. Though I note they haven't exactly gone out of their way to correct these tech "journalists".
More than one indie developer has commented that Mac users seem to be far more willing to buy software and less likely to pirate it. So much so that the percentage of buyers who use a Mac is far more than one might reasonably expect given their market share.
Which is why you don't pitch a file-server as being "to prevent the bosses' son can quit screwing my computer up".
You pitch it as "a more efficient way for us all to work, a lot easier to maintain in terms of backups..."
So you actually think MS should be responsible for pushing out 3rd party application updates? Unreasonable indeed...
They don't need to be. It would be enough to provide an API which lets applications register for updates, complete with public-key support to check signatures.
It doesn't get much better when you're looking at software which was actually designed to be used by a technical person. It amazes me how few Windows developers appear to have heard of such concepts as log files - or for that matter the event log.
I cannot express how frustrating it is to watch people who have spent their lives on Windows trying to solve problems by carrying out one random task, seeing if that helped, carrying out another random task, seeing if that helped, lather rinse and repeat.
You are aware that the anti-hero, Alex, liked Beethoven?
He was reprogrammed - brainwashed, if you like - to find violence abhorrent by showing him films of violent acts. A side effect of this brainwashing was that he also found the background music used in these films abhorrent. And the music used was his favourite - Beethoven.
If you enjoyed the film, read the book. It's.... rather darker, if such a thing were possible.