SuSE tried this. Oh, dear lord, it was bad: the YaST installation tool would completely ruin installations of NVidia drivers or Microsoft fonts, and what it did to multiple kernel installations was unspeakable. The issue was that the vendors refused to actually use, or allow, RPM package managed installations, and attempts to wrap it up in bad shell scripting invariably broke. And Sun still does this with their amazingly foolish "rpm.bin" installers for Java, designed to force you to agree to their licenses before doing the actual installation. And HP, for various drivers, and other vendors.
There are repositories that have more correctly organized such packages: the "Penguin Liberation Front" has done so for Mandriva, for various emulation tools and MPEG and DVD decoders, and the old "Livinia" repository for various other drivers, including VMWare tools. There are patent and DMCA legal issues using such tools in the USA, but it's awfully handy when overseas to be able to review what's actually in those packages.
Cults need not be profitable. Take a look at the history of Charlie Manson and his cult. And no, here are some differences between cults and religions. These include the cult tendency to focus around a single, charismatic leader whose word is absolute law, and their tendency to conceal their genuine inner beliefs in layers that each must be struggled through by new initiates, and each is further divorced from the beliefs taught at the outer layers. This is part of what helps separate the cult inner core from the outer world, and helps bind them together among others who have learned to share those new increasingly bizarre core beliefs.
It's not uncommon: there have been a _lot_ of cults in history. There used to be a pretty good organization for publishing information about cults and helping people get the facts and support from former members, called "Cult Awareness Network", but they got sued to bankruptcy and their assets taken over by Scientology, so now they're a pro-cult organization.
I'm afraid I'm going to "Godwin" myself here, and say it took an international invasion force to clear Nazism out of Germany, and the Cold War to clear Communism out of East Germany. The Germans have become very, very touchy about top-down, authority heavy organizations with thought police, regular interrogations of members with lie detectors, and locking up of dissidents, all of which Scientology does as standard policy. (Look up the Scientology "Guardian Office", the "e-meter", and "Flagg Base" for details on these policies.)
Oh, dear. I'm not saying a balloon is a great idea, I'm merely saying that rupturing the balloon is not such a big risk if you leave an escape route for excess gas, such as a hole at the bottom of the balloon. And any valve should be at the _bottom_ of the balloon, so catastrophic failures are not a big issue.
Nor am I saying that a typical gas container would address this issue: I was simply pointing out one _small_ issue that is not as bad as one might think from the earlier post.
No, I mean "the closed Sun source code hid violations of their own published Java API's that were difficult to fix or even discover". Microsoft's abuses of the API, and their claims that it was still "Java" though it had features and relied on behavior that violated the API's and the security models, was a separate set of issues. Both, however, could have been avoided by using a more open license model.
Sun's increasingly open source code helped quite a lot since then. I do hope that Oracle avoids closing that down.
And some BSD license folks have encountered _precisely_ that problem. Take a good look at the history of MySQL inside of Sun's commercial licensing model.
There's nothing like publishing "open source" code, having someone modify it, proprietize it for their products, _break it_ for interoperability, and have to deal with their concealed changes as the primary author when their clients come whining to you about how it doesn't work. I've seen this happen with Kerberos, CIFS, Java, and oh dear lord, it's been a problem with device drivers. Open API's aren't enough, either: I've seen it happen with PCL, PDF, and Postscript as well.
Java used to be much worse about it, when the code was much less open, but it still happens.
> Furthermore, the air would expand as the craft rose, risking rupturing the balloon.
This is why such a balloon would need a _valve_ or a hole at the bottom, to allow excess gas to escape. It's precisely the same reason that SCUBA and deep sea divers doing a "free ascent" need to exhale quite a lot on their way up, lest they try to hold the expanding gas in their lungs and do something really destructive to their delicate alveoli and even give themselves serious embolisms.
I am curious about the failure mechanism of these spheres. I can easily believe that an old, fatigued sphere can begin to crack and fail the rest of hte way catastrophically, but I'm curious how the failure spreads. Spewing glass shards cracking the other spheres? Shock wave directly cracking the sphere, or shock wave smacking the spheres against each other? Is the blast or shock wave from the failed sphere basically spherical, or is it directional from the way the sphere fails?
Nonsense. A doctor given 15 minutes to gather a new patient's history and a recent 8 hour forced presentation on lowering drug costs is often squeezed for time to review the dozen potential treatments and review them for factors that conflict with its use for a specific patient. I've reminded of the colleague with a bad shoulder: while he and I were discussing his keyboard layout to ease his discomfort, we discussed his new pain medication (Naproxen). I looked it up, because of some recent shoulder issues I'd had (lifting a server off of someone's foot). I noticed its kidney risks and pointed them out to this diabetic colleague, who takes blood pressure medication. While his shoulder doctor had known its usefulness, he'd missed out on the issues for diabetics and their kidneys, because he was apparently rushed by HMO policies and the short times actually allocated to talk to patients. My colleague's kidney specialist flipped out when he was asked about the drug.
The shoulder doctor was highly recommended, a skilled sports medicine specialist. But he was hurried by his HMO, whose policies really reduce the amount of time doctors can spend with patients and foist the medical history gathering and basic physical testing off onto nurses and physician's assistants, so all the doctor sees is a sheet or two filled with diagnosis. It's gotten very hard for a doctor to do any research for their patients.
Hold it right there at "Most certainly, drivers do make money". Most certainly, drivers do get income. But "making money" is a separate issue. But from speaking with cabbies I've gotten to know, the costs of owning or leasing a taxi are quite high, and gas and maintenance costs have skyrocketeed in the last 5 years. A lot of spare funds for entertainment and travel is way, way, down, so cabs are getting a lot less traffic. I'm fortunate that I still have work as a skilled technician pays enough that my cab fare from the airport is well justified in time saved for work, and that the costs of a car to drive to and from work when it's late and public transit is shut down are not justified. But the time spent _arguing_ with my company's finance people about it is starting to cost a lot more than it's worth.
The cabbies are feeling that pinch, a lot. The number of fares they get are way down, and the tips are _way_, _way_ down. Talk to the cabbies and see how they dress, and see how many of them are scrambling to find other work. And see how many of them got laid off of other work, and are finding out that this work is actually draining their wallets and eating their savings while they're scrambling to feed their kids, and they're _leaping_ at other available work.
Hardly: the volume sold today is in the millions of units annually, and they already have wireless capability with various "loop" systems, installed and enabled in numerous public facilities such as museums I've visited recently. So there's nothing really new there.
It makes a claim without any relevant details. For example, if this former employee were doing a normal security assessment to file a report on what they need to lock down after he's gone, one which his new boss didn't ask for or understand as appropriate security practice, he could face exactly these kind of charges. Or if he were plugging a hole used by the NSA for warrant-free tapping and injection of data, knowing that the hole was a constitutional violation mandated by his previous boss, and whose discovery and protest over its existence was the reason he was fired, I'd applaud his desire though not his means to plug such a hole.
Let's be quite clear: the TSA has inherited bad staff, bad bureaucracy, and bad guidance from the White House itself down to all the agencies it was created to oversee and merge and which it has profoundly failed to coordinate. The result is a security and policy nightmare, the kind of political football that incompetent middle managers flock to because it's so hard to close, and it's so hard to actually measure its work product. I'm not surprised that an employee being terminated was mishandled, or misbehaved by the agency's standards. But the agency engages in so much blatantly civil rights abuse that it's unreasonable to believe its claims of cyber attack without far more detail about what was attacked, and why.
On what _possible_ basis do you make this claim? With home jetpacks, (or more likely the jetwings at www.jet-man.com), you open the world to a lot of poorly maintained one-man craft that can drop out of the sky onto _anything_. And while there may be "no roads", there are a relatively limited set of common destinations.
Your belief that "people are self-regulationg when it comes to life and death" is also founded in, I'm sorry to say, complete fantasy. Take a good look at the number of people who smoke, overeat, engage in unsafe sex, are under-insured, and text while driving for examples of very porly regulating the risks of life and death.
If you're playing hot new games, a hot CPU is handy. So is a hot video card.
For honest reviews, I go over to www.tomshardware.com, which is very good about actually comparing a variety of hardware and doing honest reporting of their flaws and performance. They also have fascinating articles on overclocking.
Jeremy Allison shows that precisely the reverse is what happened. Novell lost a lot of open source credibility: any gains for Microsoft were extremely shortlived, and ruined by their OOXML manipulations, their support of SCO, their mysterious claims of Linux patent infringement for which they've refused to name a single example but keep claiming that such a list exists, etc.
Novell lost Jeremy due to their violations of the GPL in their collaborations with Samba, and Jeremy's work with Samba was one of the absolutely _key_ elements that Microsoft wanted to control in their deal with Novell. But Jeremy left, rather than be crippled that way.
Yes, I've worked with all of those, and a few others besides. Editing local files isn't the point. You can't _commit_ changes with CVS or Subversion without that connection, which makes doing small changes, or small changes as a set, extremely difficult with a detached laptop or when traveling or when the server is ruined.
And one of the most critical ways to prevent DDOS is "do not rely on a constant connection". This is why "git" source control is so much better than CVS or Subversionl: you can operate on your own, do your work locally, record your changes or make tags or revert patches, and make connections for updates or pushes only when desired.
Microsoft pays an incredible amount for their uptime, but they absolutely _do not_ require a connection to their servers every time you want to run your software. Laptop and business users wouldn't tolerate such external requirements.
Oh, dear, dear, dear. Have you evern _looked_ at the details of the TCP protocol, or how and why RAID works? It's only in a non-existent universe with point sources, frictionless bearings, and perfectly spherical fields that such mathematical precision is completely reliable. Even then, the 3-body problem has _not been solved_, nor is the Schrodinger equation easily solved for even the smallest circuits.
So in the real world, "butterfly effects" of small, difficult to predict and model events can cascade into profound changes in quite large-scale systems. Digitization can help, by driving most such effects below the necessary thresholds to turn a bit "on" or "off", but it's not perfect. And mathematical models of mechanical systems are profoundly _not_ perfect: the actual shape of a piece of metal after manufacture, and especially after changes are made after the original design for expense or other manufacturing reasons, can profoundly change the behavior of the real system produced.
Even with software, unless people can follow the code end-to-end, it's prone to surprising errors. Rounding errors, for example, can creep in. Values that are not tested for because one computer scientist read the API one way, and the other read it another way, are rife, and can be be very difficult to avoid.
But changing your port is easy and cuts the burden of analyzing the logs and adding clever filtering to a tiny fraction of the current burden. Switching to SSH key access alone does not help the burden of all the logs of all the failures, which clutter the heck out of my logs without filtering which is a complete waste of my resources to deal with.
Having a quite good contract is no defense against abuse by such an entity. You've actually helped make my point.
No, it was a reasonable contract at the time, selling off rights to use and license software Novell didn't care to be the main license vendor for anymore. It was reviewed (on Novell's and SCO's sides) by competent attorneys. The problem was that SCO's various mergers and business ventures left it in possession of Darl McBride, who is, is, oh my. I wouldn't care to use the kind of language that describes him accurately. But Darl is demonstrably a corporate fraud, in charge of a dying company whose markets were evaporating under the blowtorch that was Linux, inspired to use what was left of SCO to pursue what he saw as a pot of gold, and to collect his salary and stock benefits for nearly another decaded, burning funding from groups (like Microsoft) who were happy to create FUD about Linux while reapoing the benefits of seeing a formerly significant UNIX competitor burn itself out in court and eliminate any serious software threat.
A good contract is not a defense against such abuse.
Oh, dear. And I suppose the creation of Starbucks led to the housing crisis? Correlation is _not_ causation: while Nixon did a lot of fascinating things, many good, many truly awful, it's difficult to show that the expansion of free trade with China was a bad idea. Given that China was (and is still, to some extent) a paranoid society with limited free speech and nuclear weapons, it seems well worth it to defuse their military concerns about the USA by opening trade.
There are numerous other factors that have impeded genuine development: lobby protection of existing industries is a primary force protecting the car industry. Buildings and infrastructure from the 1920's has, for the most part, fallen apart long ago: it's exceptional structures that remain. And those exceptional structures didn't have the same budgetary limits as an "exceptional structure" now. The 1920's had a lot of spare money for investment, and over-leveraged investment encouraged to the stock market crash of 1929.
And sadly, take a good look at exactly how far stem cell research has gone. There is not a _single major disease_ that is treated with stem cells, anywhere in the world, except as part of experiments that have monstly failed. It just hasn't worked. Not epilepsy, not Parkinson's, not diabetes.
And the youngsters I've seeing, well, they're a mixed lot. Some are very sharp, and very educated: enough to lead quite a lot of scientific and engineering development if they could get a _job_.
Oh, dear. You apparently weren't involved in licenses that far back. I'm afraid you need a small history lesson here.
Different software developers, and companies, had profoundly different policies. It was when UNIX license owners, who'd previously been very open, changed _policy_ and started locking up their source code from external developers that people like Richard M. Stallman, and especially Richard M. Stallman, got fed up with having to reverse engineer things in order to fix them. He and people like him created the GNU software license, the so-called "copyleft", to keep the code they wrote and worked with open. That was fundamental to the Linux kernel, which used that license, and to the core pieces of the Linux operating system (with the compiler gcc, core operating system libraries such as glibc, and hundreds of other components).
But Linux came along well after the division: and the division occurred when UNIX copyright owners became much less willing to share source with developers. I'm old enough to remember this stage of software development personally, and the incredible frustrations of trying to fix a black box, especially a black box that used to be open. And don't blame "Linux" for such confusion. Linux _components_ have different licensing schemes, which often do get mislabeled as "open source". But that misnaming hardly came from Linux, it came from the (not very) "Open Source Foundation".
Windows history, well: they dare not open the code for a variety of reasons. A major one is their history of intellectual property theft: another is their demonstrated tendency to use secret API's for their own products, and deny their existence or use to others, which has been a repeated factor in the office suite software wars. It might be stronger if they released the source, but Microsoft would be far less profitable. Which path makes sense for their managers?
That's a nice thought. Unfortunately, it tends to break down in court and in business: a "good contract" may have loopholes you didn't think of, or may have been very clear but your client or partner chooses to violate it anyway, leaving you with the difficult task of suing them in order to assert your ownership. It's certainly happened with software I dealt with: for an outstanding example of such misbehavior, look into the history of SCO and the UNIX SysV copyrights, or for a truly talented individual's adventures, look at Mike Jittlov (the creator of "Wizard of Speed and Time").
Good contracts are like good passwords: they slow down abuse, but they don't stop them altogether.
Slashdot Mirror
SuSE tried this. Oh, dear lord, it was bad: the YaST installation tool would completely ruin installations of NVidia drivers or Microsoft fonts, and what it did to multiple kernel installations was unspeakable. The issue was that the vendors refused to actually use, or allow, RPM package managed installations, and attempts to wrap it up in bad shell scripting invariably broke. And Sun still does this with their amazingly foolish "rpm.bin" installers for Java, designed to force you to agree to their licenses before doing the actual installation. And HP, for various drivers, and other vendors.
There are repositories that have more correctly organized such packages: the "Penguin Liberation Front" has done so for Mandriva, for various emulation tools and MPEG and DVD decoders, and the old "Livinia" repository for various other drivers, including VMWare tools. There are patent and DMCA legal issues using such tools in the USA, but it's awfully handy when overseas to be able to review what's actually in those packages.
Oh, dear. Try watching "Fox News" for an education in orifices.
Cults need not be profitable. Take a look at the history of Charlie Manson and his cult. And no, here are some differences between cults and religions. These include the cult tendency to focus around a single, charismatic leader whose word is absolute law, and their tendency to conceal their genuine inner beliefs in layers that each must be struggled through by new initiates, and each is further divorced from the beliefs taught at the outer layers. This is part of what helps separate the cult inner core from the outer world, and helps bind them together among others who have learned to share those new increasingly bizarre core beliefs.
It's not uncommon: there have been a _lot_ of cults in history. There used to be a pretty good organization for publishing information about cults and helping people get the facts and support from former members, called "Cult Awareness Network", but they got sued to bankruptcy and their assets taken over by Scientology, so now they're a pro-cult organization.
> I don't know of many other institutions that attempt to bully a national government, you know?
I take it you're not a member of a union?
I'm afraid I'm going to "Godwin" myself here, and say it took an international invasion force to clear Nazism out of Germany, and the Cold War to clear Communism out of East Germany. The Germans have become very, very touchy about top-down, authority heavy organizations with thought police, regular interrogations of members with lie detectors, and locking up of dissidents, all of which Scientology does as standard policy. (Look up the Scientology "Guardian Office", the "e-meter", and "Flagg Base" for details on these policies.)
Oh, dear. I'm not saying a balloon is a great idea, I'm merely saying that rupturing the balloon is not such a big risk if you leave an escape route for excess gas, such as a hole at the bottom of the balloon. And any valve should be at the _bottom_ of the balloon, so catastrophic failures are not a big issue.
Nor am I saying that a typical gas container would address this issue: I was simply pointing out one _small_ issue that is not as bad as one might think from the earlier post.
No, I mean "the closed Sun source code hid violations of their own published Java API's that were difficult to fix or even discover". Microsoft's abuses of the API, and their claims that it was still "Java" though it had features and relied on behavior that violated the API's and the security models, was a separate set of issues. Both, however, could have been avoided by using a more open license model.
Sun's increasingly open source code helped quite a lot since then. I do hope that Oracle avoids closing that down.
And some BSD license folks have encountered _precisely_ that problem. Take a good look at the history of MySQL inside of Sun's commercial licensing model.
There's nothing like publishing "open source" code, having someone modify it, proprietize it for their products, _break it_ for interoperability, and have to deal with their concealed changes as the primary author when their clients come whining to you about how it doesn't work. I've seen this happen with Kerberos, CIFS, Java, and oh dear lord, it's been a problem with device drivers. Open API's aren't enough, either: I've seen it happen with PCL, PDF, and Postscript as well.
Java used to be much worse about it, when the code was much less open, but it still happens.
You wrote:
> Furthermore, the air would expand as the craft rose, risking rupturing the balloon.
This is why such a balloon would need a _valve_ or a hole at the bottom, to allow excess gas to escape. It's precisely the same reason that SCUBA and deep sea divers doing a "free ascent" need to exhale quite a lot on their way up, lest they try to hold the expanding gas in their lungs and do something really destructive to their delicate alveoli and even give themselves serious embolisms.
I am curious about the failure mechanism of these spheres. I can easily believe that an old, fatigued sphere can begin to crack and fail the rest of hte way catastrophically, but I'm curious how the failure spreads. Spewing glass shards cracking the other spheres? Shock wave directly cracking the sphere, or shock wave smacking the spheres against each other? Is the blast or shock wave from the failed sphere basically spherical, or is it directional from the way the sphere fails?
Nonsense. A doctor given 15 minutes to gather a new patient's history and a recent 8 hour forced presentation on lowering drug costs is often squeezed for time to review the dozen potential treatments and review them for factors that conflict with its use for a specific patient. I've reminded of the colleague with a bad shoulder: while he and I were discussing his keyboard layout to ease his discomfort, we discussed his new pain medication (Naproxen). I looked it up, because of some recent shoulder issues I'd had (lifting a server off of someone's foot). I noticed its kidney risks and pointed them out to this diabetic colleague, who takes blood pressure medication. While his shoulder doctor had known its usefulness, he'd missed out on the issues for diabetics and their kidneys, because he was apparently rushed by HMO policies and the short times actually allocated to talk to patients. My colleague's kidney specialist flipped out when he was asked about the drug.
The shoulder doctor was highly recommended, a skilled sports medicine specialist. But he was hurried by his HMO, whose policies really reduce the amount of time doctors can spend with patients and foist the medical history gathering and basic physical testing off onto nurses and physician's assistants, so all the doctor sees is a sheet or two filled with diagnosis. It's gotten very hard for a doctor to do any research for their patients.
Hold it right there at "Most certainly, drivers do make money". Most certainly, drivers do get income. But "making money" is a separate issue. But from speaking with cabbies I've gotten to know, the costs of owning or leasing a taxi are quite high, and gas and maintenance costs have skyrocketeed in the last 5 years. A lot of spare funds for entertainment and travel is way, way, down, so cabs are getting a lot less traffic. I'm fortunate that I still have work as a skilled technician pays enough that my cab fare from the airport is well justified in time saved for work, and that the costs of a car to drive to and from work when it's late and public transit is shut down are not justified. But the time spent _arguing_ with my company's finance people about it is starting to cost a lot more than it's worth.
The cabbies are feeling that pinch, a lot. The number of fares they get are way down, and the tips are _way_, _way_ down. Talk to the cabbies and see how they dress, and see how many of them are scrambling to find other work. And see how many of them got laid off of other work, and are finding out that this work is actually draining their wallets and eating their savings while they're scrambling to feed their kids, and they're _leaping_ at other available work.
Hardly: the volume sold today is in the millions of units annually, and they already have wireless capability with various "loop" systems, installed and enabled in numerous public facilities such as museums I've visited recently. So there's nothing really new there.
And the rest will subscribe to Slashdot.
It makes a claim without any relevant details. For example, if this former employee were doing a normal security assessment to file a report on what they need to lock down after he's gone, one which his new boss didn't ask for or understand as appropriate security practice, he could face exactly these kind of charges. Or if he were plugging a hole used by the NSA for warrant-free tapping and injection of data, knowing that the hole was a constitutional violation mandated by his previous boss, and whose discovery and protest over its existence was the reason he was fired, I'd applaud his desire though not his means to plug such a hole.
Let's be quite clear: the TSA has inherited bad staff, bad bureaucracy, and bad guidance from the White House itself down to all the agencies it was created to oversee and merge and which it has profoundly failed to coordinate. The result is a security and policy nightmare, the kind of political football that incompetent middle managers flock to because it's so hard to close, and it's so hard to actually measure its work product. I'm not surprised that an employee being terminated was mishandled, or misbehaved by the agency's standards. But the agency engages in so much blatantly civil rights abuse that it's unreasonable to believe its claims of cyber attack without far more detail about what was attacked, and why.
On what _possible_ basis do you make this claim? With home jetpacks, (or more likely the jetwings at www.jet-man.com), you open the world to a lot of poorly maintained one-man craft that can drop out of the sky onto _anything_. And while there may be "no roads", there are a relatively limited set of common destinations.
Your belief that "people are self-regulationg when it comes to life and death" is also founded in, I'm sorry to say, complete fantasy. Take a good look at the number of people who smoke, overeat, engage in unsafe sex, are under-insured, and text while driving for examples of very porly regulating the risks of life and death.
If you're playing hot new games, a hot CPU is handy. So is a hot video card.
For honest reviews, I go over to www.tomshardware.com, which is very good about actually comparing a variety of hardware and doing honest reporting of their flaws and performance. They also have fascinating articles on overclocking.
Jeremy Allison shows that precisely the reverse is what happened. Novell lost a lot of open source credibility: any gains for Microsoft were extremely shortlived, and ruined by their OOXML manipulations, their support of SCO, their mysterious claims of Linux patent infringement for which they've refused to name a single example but keep claiming that such a list exists, etc.
Novell lost Jeremy due to their violations of the GPL in their collaborations with Samba, and Jeremy's work with Samba was one of the absolutely _key_ elements that Microsoft wanted to control in their deal with Novell. But Jeremy left, rather than be crippled that way.
Yes, I've worked with all of those, and a few others besides. Editing local files isn't the point. You can't _commit_ changes with CVS or Subversion without that connection, which makes doing small changes, or small changes as a set, extremely difficult with a detached laptop or when traveling or when the server is ruined.
Git certainly _does_ work differently. Go catch Linus's comments on it, at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4XpnKHJAok8.
And one of the most critical ways to prevent DDOS is "do not rely on a constant connection". This is why "git" source control is so much better than CVS or Subversionl: you can operate on your own, do your work locally, record your changes or make tags or revert patches, and make connections for updates or pushes only when desired.
Microsoft pays an incredible amount for their uptime, but they absolutely _do not_ require a connection to their servers every time you want to run your software. Laptop and business users wouldn't tolerate such external requirements.
Oh, dear, dear, dear. Have you evern _looked_ at the details of the TCP protocol, or how and why RAID works? It's only in a non-existent universe with point sources, frictionless bearings, and perfectly spherical fields that such mathematical precision is completely reliable. Even then, the 3-body problem has _not been solved_, nor is the Schrodinger equation easily solved for even the smallest circuits.
So in the real world, "butterfly effects" of small, difficult to predict and model events can cascade into profound changes in quite large-scale systems. Digitization can help, by driving most such effects below the necessary thresholds to turn a bit "on" or "off", but it's not perfect. And mathematical models of mechanical systems are profoundly _not_ perfect: the actual shape of a piece of metal after manufacture, and especially after changes are made after the original design for expense or other manufacturing reasons, can profoundly change the behavior of the real system produced.
Even with software, unless people can follow the code end-to-end, it's prone to surprising errors. Rounding errors, for example, can creep in. Values that are not tested for because one computer scientist read the API one way, and the other read it another way, are rife, and can be be very difficult to avoid.
But changing your port is easy and cuts the burden of analyzing the logs and adding clever filtering to a tiny fraction of the current burden. Switching to SSH key access alone does not help the burden of all the logs of all the failures, which clutter the heck out of my logs without filtering which is a complete waste of my resources to deal with.
Having a quite good contract is no defense against abuse by such an entity. You've actually helped make my point.
No, it was a reasonable contract at the time, selling off rights to use and license software Novell didn't care to be the main license vendor for anymore. It was reviewed (on Novell's and SCO's sides) by competent attorneys. The problem was that SCO's various mergers and business ventures left it in possession of Darl McBride, who is, is, oh my. I wouldn't care to use the kind of language that describes him accurately. But Darl is demonstrably a corporate fraud, in charge of a dying company whose markets were evaporating under the blowtorch that was Linux, inspired to use what was left of SCO to pursue what he saw as a pot of gold, and to collect his salary and stock benefits for nearly another decaded, burning funding from groups (like Microsoft) who were happy to create FUD about Linux while reapoing the benefits of seeing a formerly significant UNIX competitor burn itself out in court and eliminate any serious software threat.
A good contract is not a defense against such abuse.
Oh, dear. And I suppose the creation of Starbucks led to the housing crisis? Correlation is _not_ causation: while Nixon did a lot of fascinating things, many good, many truly awful, it's difficult to show that the expansion of free trade with China was a bad idea. Given that China was (and is still, to some extent) a paranoid society with limited free speech and nuclear weapons, it seems well worth it to defuse their military concerns about the USA by opening trade.
There are numerous other factors that have impeded genuine development: lobby protection of existing industries is a primary force protecting the car industry. Buildings and infrastructure from the 1920's has, for the most part, fallen apart long ago: it's exceptional structures that remain. And those exceptional structures didn't have the same budgetary limits as an "exceptional structure" now. The 1920's had a lot of spare money for investment, and over-leveraged investment encouraged to the stock market crash of 1929.
And sadly, take a good look at exactly how far stem cell research has gone. There is not a _single major disease_ that is treated with stem cells, anywhere in the world, except as part of experiments that have monstly failed. It just hasn't worked. Not epilepsy, not Parkinson's, not diabetes.
And the youngsters I've seeing, well, they're a mixed lot. Some are very sharp, and very educated: enough to lead quite a lot of scientific and engineering development if they could get a _job_.
Oh, dear. You apparently weren't involved in licenses that far back. I'm afraid you need a small history lesson here.
Different software developers, and companies, had profoundly different policies. It was when UNIX license owners, who'd previously been very open, changed _policy_ and started locking up their source code from external developers that people like Richard M. Stallman, and especially Richard M. Stallman, got fed up with having to reverse engineer things in order to fix them. He and people like him created the GNU software license, the so-called "copyleft", to keep the code they wrote and worked with open. That was fundamental to the Linux kernel, which used that license, and to the core pieces of the Linux operating system (with the compiler gcc, core operating system libraries such as glibc, and hundreds of other components).
But Linux came along well after the division: and the division occurred when UNIX copyright owners became much less willing to share source with developers. I'm old enough to remember this stage of software development personally, and the incredible frustrations of trying to fix a black box, especially a black box that used to be open. And don't blame "Linux" for such confusion. Linux _components_ have different licensing schemes, which often do get mislabeled as "open source". But that misnaming hardly came from Linux, it came from the (not very) "Open Source Foundation".
Windows history, well: they dare not open the code for a variety of reasons. A major one is their history of intellectual property theft: another is their demonstrated tendency to use secret API's for their own products, and deny their existence or use to others, which has been a repeated factor in the office suite software wars. It might be stronger if they released the source, but Microsoft would be far less profitable. Which path makes sense for their managers?
That's a nice thought. Unfortunately, it tends to break down in court and in business: a "good contract" may have loopholes you didn't think of, or may have been very clear but your client or partner chooses to violate it anyway, leaving you with the difficult task of suing them in order to assert your ownership. It's certainly happened with software I dealt with: for an outstanding example of such misbehavior, look into the history of SCO and the UNIX SysV copyrights, or for a truly talented individual's adventures, look at Mike Jittlov (the creator of "Wizard of Speed and Time").
Good contracts are like good passwords: they slow down abuse, but they don't stop them altogether.