Not any more, it's not. SCO has claimed they do not accept the terms of the GPL; according the the GPL, that means they are not licensed to use that code under the terms of the GPL.
This is a clear case of copyright infringement. The second SCO claimed the GPL was invalid (in effect, claiming they do not agree to the terms of the GPL), they lost all rights to use GPLd code that is not their own.
If a simple robbery of 100 bucks can get someone a couple of years in jail with Bubba the butt-bandit, defrauding investors out of millions should earn a much greater penalty, preferably involving honey and army ants.
<AOL MODE="NEWBIE">Me Too!</AOL>
Seriously. If I were to defraud the company for whom I work of a couple of thousand dollars, they'd throw me in jail for at least 10 years, and take the money I stole (make me pay it back).
WHY THE FUCK HAVEN'T THE ENRON EXECS BEEN GANG-RAPED BY A MOB OF ANGRY CHIMNEY SWEEPS? That'd be justice.
"Robert O. Russell, a wellsite geologist at the first well in North America (at Fort McMurray, Alberta, Canada) drilled into crystalline basement granitic shield rocks for the express purpose of commercial hydrocarbon exploration, has pointed out that there are more than 400 wells and fields worldwide, both off-shore and on-shore that produce or have recently produced oil from igneous rocks." (Quoted from here)
There is really no evidence supporting an organic origin of petroleum. At one time, it was the best explanaition we had; now, with oil drilled from beneath basement rock, and from 3B-year-old sandstone, there is no longer any reason to just assume organic origin. Too much evidence points to non-organic origins.
Oil has been retrieved from beneath 3B-year-old sandstone indicates that oil predates prokaryotic life. There existence of hydrocarbons on Titan, in asteroids, and in the Kuiper belt, all indicate that oil is of non-organic origin.
The current hypothesis is simple: hydrocarbons (including oil and natural gas) are remnants of the formation of our solar system, our planet.
This, however, doesn't negate the fact that internal combustion engines are not good for our environment, at least on the scale we use them. The article may use falsehoods for rhetorical purposes, but that doesn't disqualify the concept and evidence of petroleum-based pollution.
#1 - serious question - how many serious accounting packages are being worked on in the open-source world? It's exactly the kind of software hackers usually denigrate...
In my analysis, it isn't that open-source developers don't want to work on this sort of thing, it's that there is a certain amount of infrastructure that needs to be in place before projects like this can proceed. Several enterprise-class accounting projects have been started, but few finish; it's because the tools aren't in place yet.
The FOSS community doesn't avoid doing corporate-type projects, as a lot of people claim. FOSS software is written because it is positioned properly to fullfill a need. Until very recently, FOSS was not accepted in the enterprise. Now, as more and more corporations are depending on various FOSS software, you will see many projects targetting medium-to-large corporations.
For instance, look at the relatively-new GNU Enterprise project. This is a major undertaking which has begun by creating the tools required to build an enterprise management infrastructure.
As FOSS software penetrates various markets, you will see many FOSS projects building finance/hr/materials-management/analysis tools. I predict that 2004 will be the year of the enterprise for FOSS (Linux,*BSD,GNU). You'll see prepackaged medical management software, ERP software, etc. By the end of 2005 I believe you will see a complete enterprise management system, from supply chain to finance to HR to payroll.
"Software should be free," is not a double-standard. It's an ideal.
When you hear people griping about spending tons of money on MS products, it's because they are overpriced, bloated, insecure hacks from a corporate megalith that hates innovation because it means they might miss the Next Big Thing. Like the music industry, they don't want surprise hits; they want engineered hits.
Apple, on the other hand, has a corporate philosophy that respest, even *loves*, the computer. I believe this is Wozniak's biggest legacy: the love of the computer. So when Apple makes a product, it is often well worth the admission price.
You are confusing two orthogonal issues: the ideal of free software, and the judgements of the current state of corporate, commercial software. Just because some of us hold the Free Software ideal does not mean we don't hold valid opinions about the commercial software industry.
Unless, the documents don't contain information about state of the art US aircraft and the US has no real idea what the hell it was. That would be a damn good reason to keep it locked up - and quite frankly, I'd agree with them.
Ahem.
Am I wrong in my assumption that the government of the USA exists to serve the public in the public interest? (You know, "Government for the people, of the people, and by the people?" Sure, it's bullshit, but it's bullshit worth striving for.)
In that case, the government has no right to hide information from the public, except in the interest of public safety. (For instance, the deployment of US nuclear submarines might not be good public knowledge.) There is no other good reason for the government to hide information from its people.
In fact, I'd go as far as to say that the government has a responsibility to keep the public informed of important events. I would go further: I would say it is the public's responsibility to audit the functioning of the government on a regular, intensive basis.
The FOIA allows this auditing, even if it is 25 years after the fact. The only information that might need to remain classified is some information which has not changed over 25 years.
The FOIA has revealed some very interesting facts, like the funding by President Kennedy of the longest-running terrorist campaign against any nation (Operation Mongoose, against Cuba, which ran for many years; it may continue to this day). To FOIA is there for us to learn about our government; the government does not have the right to select the information we learn about it.
That would be like Microsoft choosing which memos are admitted as evidence during its anti-trust trials.
As far as this UFO thing goes: there has been no plausible evidence or explanaition to support visitation from other planets. Occam's Razor indicates it's nothing more than a fireball, just a regular, crashing-to-earth rock that left a trail of vaporized carbon, ice, and rock.
But, who knows? Maybe there *was* some sort of alien landing.
Oh, it's free trade, all right. As in, the corporations are free to trade your ass into wage-slavery for their own profits.
Or: the affluent 1% of the world are free to trade the environment to make a bit more money, while widening the econimic gap between them and everyone else.
Or: governments are "free" to trade basic human rights (such as the right to live) for corporate money.
I only had a quick read but it seemed to be the idea of dynamicaly generating content based on the content of the cookie.
Right. So this patent covers everything except using cookies to track user information. Almost any time you *do* anything useful with the cookie, you are infringing their patent.
Fortunately, there should be tons of cases of prior art, including the standard, "Hello, World!" cookie examples I remember from years ago.
For those that didn't RTFM, the patent is about customising content (which may include weather reports).
Exactly.
They gave one specific example. As I read it, the patent could go as far as to preclude Amazon's personalized shopping, CNN's targetted news, and Slashdot's login facility.
Commercial companies don't 'buy off governments.' They cut them in. There's a profound difference between these two concepts.
And that difference would be... what, exactly?
Seriously, it's like the tax breaks the US government gives major corporations. If a corporation doesn't pay $1M in taxes, that's like the government giving them $1M. It's corporate welfare. And if a company gives the US Government money, and expects something in return (like, being represented as a special interest in international treaties), how is that diffent from "buying them off?"
Call it what you want, but the end result is the same: the individual (or "consumer," as they are called in the industry) is the one getting fucked.
Look at WinModems and their rise of functionality under Linux..
Excellent example. Look how long it took Linux to provide even rudimentary support for WinModems. There are still patent issues surrounding WinModem drivers. If even one part of this deal includes patented "technology," Linux will be locked out.
This *is* a dire issue, one that will require intense scrutiny. MS desires complete control of everyone's computing; this is clear both from statements made in the past, and actions leading into the future. If there isn't active and vigorous opposition, they will get everything they want.
At the moment, they are looking at methods of locking Linux out. In the past, they have tried hidden, proprietary software, marketting, and outright lies (which is, I guess, marketting); as this hasn't been too successful, they *will* try to lock Linux out using legal means. (That is, patents.)
Considering that universities are heavily subsidised by federal and state dollars, and that most students pay heavily for the "privelege" of living in the dorms, this constitutes an invasion of privacy.
UofF has not only the right but the responsibility to ensure that their network resources are protected, not only from without but from within as well.
As the saying goes, your right to swing your fists ends at the tip of my nose. The rights of U of F do *not* supercede the rights of the students.
These are complicated times, but as citizens of a "Free" nation, we should not readily give up our rights for a little bit of perceived "safety." As a rule of thumb, no policy or action should interfere with the right of an individual in favor of the rights of a group.
But of course, that's probably just my continental libertarianism peeking through.
This feature has been available for a long time. If you use gdm, run gdmconfig as root, and in the "general" tab, check the box labeled "Login a user automatically on first bootup", and select a username from the dropdown box.
1) Integrate seemless plug-in support into Mozilla.
Yeah!
2) Make Open Office slicker/ handle Mickeysoft documents better.
I haven't had any problems with the 1.1 series. I like it a lot better than MS-Word/MS-Excel/Powerpoint, and the import has been pretty much flawless.
3) Make a spreadsheet that doesn't suck.
There are spreadsheets that don't suck?
4) Make is to that I can actually cut and paste weird stuff between applications.
Although not universal, I've not had a problem with cutting/pasting strange things between bonobo-enabled apps.
5) Make is so that my PC can get updated just by clicking on items and not chasing down library incompatiblites or typing "rpm --force" or "make install" or whatever.
I'm running a wierd brew of Debian stable/unstable/testing/experimental, and I don't have a problem with that. Are you sure it's not an operator-headspace issue?
BTW, as other posts have mentioned, the problems you mention are not specific to Linux. 2 & 3 are perceptions, not fact; 5 is an artifact of your distribution, and 4 is fixed to a limited extent (and getting better daily).
So, only 1 is a real issue (and not much of one if you have a good distribution that installs plugins for you). 4 is definitely an issue.
This is a delicate issue that we are NOT going to mess with.
Hmm. All it takes is some random unverified babblings of some company to drive you off? Even though there is no precedence for sueing end-user customers for copyright or patent infringement?
This is NOT a delicate issue. This is all very cut-and-dried. Although IANAL, I can find NO legal precedence for SCO's threat to sue end-users. They may be able to demand that people stop using Linux or pay a lincense fee, but not until they have proven in court there is copyright infringement.
And, oddly enough, the case they are taking to court has nothing to do with copyright infringement. It's a contract case, plain and simple. So we can continue to use Linux legally until such time as SCO proves that Linux code infringes their code; at that time, we can switch to another OS, or (more likely) use the "clean" code that will result from source-code cleansing that is sure to follow.
There's no delicacy here, just heavy-handed attempts at gouging unsuspecting/ignorant Linux users into paying up some "protection" money.
Unless your company distributes Linux, your company is in no danger.
But, then again, IANAL, so don't take this as legal advice. It's not.
As annoying as telemarketing calls are, they do serve a function.
A corporate function. I'm not interested in corporate functions. If I want to talk to someone, I give them my phone number, and say, "Call me sometime. We'll do lunch."
If this is a question of free speech, then I say we get the numbers of the telemarketers, and start calling them at all hours, just to chat.
It's just free speech, after all.
Just because 50 million people believe that they shouldn't have to be bothered saying "I'm not interested." doesn't necessarily mean Congress can shut the industry down.
It's not Congress, it's the people who opt-out. Congress merely gave people the power to opt-out. How is that unfair to the industry? Hell, the industry should be glad! That's 50 Million phone calls they don't have to make because those people would have said "No" anyway.
Also, corporations do not have any fundamental "right" to exist. Corporations are charters granted by the state. Until the late 1880s in the US, the state could excersize the right to revoke a charter if it were determined that the corporation were not acting in the best interest of the citizenry.
Unfortunately, newspapers are not in the business of reporting the news, but in selling eyeballs to corporations in the form of advertising. As long as Microsoft (and other business that feel they are reliant on Microsoft products for revenue) buys ads, and Linux (or other alternatives) does not, they are going to slant the news Microsoft's direction.
Plus (to borrow from another post in a child thread), they can sell a lot more newspapers (and thus eyeballs) by saying, "Automobiles subject to rollover!" than by saying, "Some models of Foo's SUVs subject to rollover at high speeds in tight turns."
That's part of the reason the US news agencies feed into the fear culture that's been building here for the last several years.
How hard is it to install a recommended patch cluster? Not very hard at all. Download a patch fie (about 80M+ sometimes) and install it on all your machines. Sometimes you must restart the machine (when a patch touches the kernel, which is fairly regularly with recommended patches).
Sun's package management is really quite nice. All it needs is a network front-end of some sort to make it complete. (This would, of course, add a new security issue.)
And Solaris *far* outshines Linux on high-end Sun hardware. AFAIK, Linux does not handle CPU hot-swapping, for instance. In fact, in my experience, Linux is really lacking in the fault-tolerence department when compared to Solaris on Sun hardware.
With that said, Linux is moving forward very rapidly. And Sun just pissed me off (not for the first time). Although they have been good for the FOSS community in the past (NFS, NIS, RPC, Open Office, etc, etc, and of course, etc), they are quickly squandering any good-will this geek ever had for them.
I might be the only one, but I'm thinking that, come next replacement cycle, I'm gonna start swapping out Sun boxes for Linux machines.
We run our financial and medical database systems on Solaris, for exactly the reasons posted: stability, robustness, and throughput. Sun hardware is well worth the price of admission.
Solaris is also very nice, but mostly just in the way it integrates with Sun hardware, so you have hot-swap CPUs and memory, for instance (not available on all hardware).
That said: Sun is fucking up. If they think pissing off the FOSS community is going to help their sagging sales, they are grossly mistaken. Many people participating in the FOSS community also use (and purchase!) Sun equipment. Until recently, they have been walking the fine line between helping the community, and just exploiting it. Now they have crossed over.
One is a political ideology, the other is an economic philosophy.
Unfettered corporate capitalism leads to fascism (the state regulation of the economy) in that the state becomes a tool of the corporations, rather like you see in the USA today.
A well-structured capitalist society *requires* government intervention, for the same reasons a well-structured civil society requires government intervention (in the form of the police, and the judicial arm of the government). Even if you ignore the travesty of corporations-as-entities as practiced by the USA today, and concentrate on corporations-as-public-charters (such as the the US had before about 1880 or so), you still need regulation and monitoring. Otherwise, the biggest corporations will carry the most power, and therefore have the ability to "regulate" (in the political and economic sense) the functioning of corporations of lesser power.
This is why the US has the Sherman Act, and anti-trust laws. Now, these laws are not followed, as is evidenced by the recent anti-trust ruling against Microsoft, and the refusal by the US government to follow through on any meaningful penalty. But, even criminal law doesn't work against corporations, as seen by the recent inaction of the US government against the Enron corporation, and its executives responsible for those crimes.
The "true principals of capitalism" work no better than the true principles of communism. (*NOT* that there has been an implementation of true communism, except on extremely small scales. The most we've ever seen practiced by as large as a country is socialism.)
Slashdot Mirror
(since SCO using the code is allowed by the GPL)
Not any more, it's not. SCO has claimed they do not accept the terms of the GPL; according the the GPL, that means they are not licensed to use that code under the terms of the GPL.
This is a clear case of copyright infringement. The second SCO claimed the GPL was invalid (in effect, claiming they do not agree to the terms of the GPL), they lost all rights to use GPLd code that is not their own.
If a simple robbery of 100 bucks can get someone a couple of years in jail with Bubba the butt-bandit, defrauding investors out of millions should earn a much greater penalty, preferably involving honey and army ants.
<AOL MODE="NEWBIE">Me Too!</AOL>
Seriously. If I were to defraud the company for whom I work of a couple of thousand dollars, they'd throw me in jail for at least 10 years, and take the money I stole (make me pay it back).
WHY THE FUCK HAVEN'T THE ENRON EXECS BEEN GANG-RAPED BY A MOB OF ANGRY CHIMNEY SWEEPS? That'd be justice.
So.. I just have to ask: Where's Linux headed next?
World domination.
Duh.
"Robert O. Russell, a wellsite geologist at the first well in North America (at Fort McMurray, Alberta, Canada) drilled into crystalline basement granitic shield rocks for the express purpose of commercial hydrocarbon exploration, has pointed out that there are more than 400 wells and fields worldwide, both off-shore and on-shore that produce or have recently produced oil from igneous rocks." (Quoted from here)
There is really no evidence supporting an organic origin of petroleum. At one time, it was the best explanaition we had; now, with oil drilled from beneath basement rock, and from 3B-year-old sandstone, there is no longer any reason to just assume organic origin. Too much evidence points to non-organic origins.
Oil has been retrieved from beneath 3B-year-old sandstone indicates that oil predates prokaryotic life. There existence of hydrocarbons on Titan, in asteroids, and in the Kuiper belt, all indicate that oil is of non-organic origin.
The current hypothesis is simple: hydrocarbons (including oil and natural gas) are remnants of the formation of our solar system, our planet.
This, however, doesn't negate the fact that internal combustion engines are not good for our environment, at least on the scale we use them. The article may use falsehoods for rhetorical purposes, but that doesn't disqualify the concept and evidence of petroleum-based pollution.
#1 - serious question - how many serious accounting packages are being worked on in the open-source world? It's exactly the kind of software hackers usually denigrate...
In my analysis, it isn't that open-source developers don't want to work on this sort of thing, it's that there is a certain amount of infrastructure that needs to be in place before projects like this can proceed. Several enterprise-class accounting projects have been started, but few finish; it's because the tools aren't in place yet.
The FOSS community doesn't avoid doing corporate-type projects, as a lot of people claim. FOSS software is written because it is positioned properly to fullfill a need. Until very recently, FOSS was not accepted in the enterprise. Now, as more and more corporations are depending on various FOSS software, you will see many projects targetting medium-to-large corporations.
For instance, look at the relatively-new GNU Enterprise project. This is a major undertaking which has begun by creating the tools required to build an enterprise management infrastructure.
As FOSS software penetrates various markets, you will see many FOSS projects building finance/hr/materials-management/analysis tools. I predict that 2004 will be the year of the enterprise for FOSS (Linux,*BSD,GNU). You'll see prepackaged medical management software, ERP software, etc. By the end of 2005 I believe you will see a complete enterprise management system, from supply chain to finance to HR to payroll.
But maybe I'm just a pollyanna.
"Software should be free," is not a double-standard. It's an ideal.
When you hear people griping about spending tons of money on MS products, it's because they are overpriced, bloated, insecure hacks from a corporate megalith that hates innovation because it means they might miss the Next Big Thing. Like the music industry, they don't want surprise hits; they want engineered hits.
Apple, on the other hand, has a corporate philosophy that respest, even *loves*, the computer. I believe this is Wozniak's biggest legacy: the love of the computer. So when Apple makes a product, it is often well worth the admission price.
You are confusing two orthogonal issues: the ideal of free software, and the judgements of the current state of corporate, commercial software. Just because some of us hold the Free Software ideal does not mean we don't hold valid opinions about the commercial software industry.
I hope this helps clarify the issue.
Unless, the documents don't contain information about state of the art US aircraft and the US has no real idea what the hell it was. That would be a damn good reason to keep it locked up - and quite frankly, I'd agree with them.
Ahem.
Am I wrong in my assumption that the government of the USA exists to serve the public in the public interest? (You know, "Government for the people, of the people, and by the people?" Sure, it's bullshit, but it's bullshit worth striving for.)
In that case, the government has no right to hide information from the public, except in the interest of public safety. (For instance, the deployment of US nuclear submarines might not be good public knowledge.) There is no other good reason for the government to hide information from its people.
In fact, I'd go as far as to say that the government has a responsibility to keep the public informed of important events. I would go further: I would say it is the public's responsibility to audit the functioning of the government on a regular, intensive basis.
The FOIA allows this auditing, even if it is 25 years after the fact. The only information that might need to remain classified is some information which has not changed over 25 years.
The FOIA has revealed some very interesting facts, like the funding by President Kennedy of the longest-running terrorist campaign against any nation (Operation Mongoose, against Cuba, which ran for many years; it may continue to this day). To FOIA is there for us to learn about our government; the government does not have the right to select the information we learn about it.
That would be like Microsoft choosing which memos are admitted as evidence during its anti-trust trials.
As far as this UFO thing goes: there has been no plausible evidence or explanaition to support visitation from other planets. Occam's Razor indicates it's nothing more than a fireball, just a regular, crashing-to-earth rock that left a trail of vaporized carbon, ice, and rock.
But, who knows? Maybe there *was* some sort of alien landing.
Oh, it's free trade, all right. As in, the corporations are free to trade your ass into wage-slavery for their own profits.
Or: the affluent 1% of the world are free to trade the environment to make a bit more money, while widening the econimic gap between them and everyone else.
Or: governments are "free" to trade basic human rights (such as the right to live) for corporate money.
You get the idea.
I only had a quick read but it seemed to be the idea of dynamicaly generating content based on the content of the cookie.
Right. So this patent covers everything except using cookies to track user information. Almost any time you *do* anything useful with the cookie, you are infringing their patent.
Fortunately, there should be tons of cases of prior art, including the standard, "Hello, World!" cookie examples I remember from years ago.
For those that didn't RTFM, the patent is about customising content (which may include weather reports).
Exactly.
They gave one specific example. As I read it, the patent could go as far as to preclude Amazon's personalized shopping, CNN's targetted news, and Slashdot's login facility.
So it is far worse than the title suggests.
How is that FUD, exactly?
Commercial companies don't 'buy off governments.' They cut them in. There's a profound difference between these two concepts.
And that difference would be... what, exactly?
Seriously, it's like the tax breaks the US government gives major corporations. If a corporation doesn't pay $1M in taxes, that's like the government giving them $1M. It's corporate welfare. And if a company gives the US Government money, and expects something in return (like, being represented as a special interest in international treaties), how is that diffent from "buying them off?"
Call it what you want, but the end result is the same: the individual (or "consumer," as they are called in the industry) is the one getting fucked.
Look at WinModems and their rise of functionality under Linux..
Excellent example. Look how long it took Linux to provide even rudimentary support for WinModems. There are still patent issues surrounding WinModem drivers. If even one part of this deal includes patented "technology," Linux will be locked out.
This *is* a dire issue, one that will require intense scrutiny. MS desires complete control of everyone's computing; this is clear both from statements made in the past, and actions leading into the future. If there isn't active and vigorous opposition, they will get everything they want.
At the moment, they are looking at methods of locking Linux out. In the past, they have tried hidden, proprietary software, marketting, and outright lies (which is, I guess, marketting); as this hasn't been too successful, they *will* try to lock Linux out using legal means. (That is, patents.)
Considering that universities are heavily subsidised by federal and state dollars, and that most students pay heavily for the "privelege" of living in the dorms, this constitutes an invasion of privacy.
UofF has not only the right but the responsibility to ensure that their network resources are protected, not only from without but from within as well.
As the saying goes, your right to swing your fists ends at the tip of my nose. The rights of U of F do *not* supercede the rights of the students.
These are complicated times, but as citizens of a "Free" nation, we should not readily give up our rights for a little bit of perceived "safety." As a rule of thumb, no policy or action should interfere with the right of an individual in favor of the rights of a group.
But of course, that's probably just my continental libertarianism peeking through.
WTF? Since when did we need a bloated interpreted language to boot our systems?
:) )
Well, the current init system relies on shell scripts.....
(I agree; I *hate*hate*hate* Python. It sucks, and it blows. If I wanted white-space blocking, I'd program in MUMPS.
(Everyone knows Perl is the way to go.
Uhm....
This feature has been available for a long time. If you use gdm, run gdmconfig as root, and in the "general" tab, check the box labeled "Login a user automatically on first bootup", and select a username from the dropdown box.
I'm sure kdm has similar features.
1) Integrate seemless plug-in support into Mozilla.
Yeah!
2) Make Open Office slicker/ handle Mickeysoft documents better.
I haven't had any problems with the 1.1 series. I like it a lot better than MS-Word/MS-Excel/Powerpoint, and the import has been pretty much flawless.
3) Make a spreadsheet that doesn't suck.
There are spreadsheets that don't suck?
4) Make is to that I can actually cut and paste weird stuff between applications.
Although not universal, I've not had a problem with cutting/pasting strange things between bonobo-enabled apps.
5) Make is so that my PC can get updated just by clicking on items and not chasing down library incompatiblites or typing "rpm --force" or "make install" or whatever.
I'm running a wierd brew of Debian stable/unstable/testing/experimental, and I don't have a problem with that. Are you sure it's not an operator-headspace issue?
BTW, as other posts have mentioned, the problems you mention are not specific to Linux. 2 & 3 are perceptions, not fact; 5 is an artifact of your distribution, and 4 is fixed to a limited extent (and getting better daily).
So, only 1 is a real issue (and not much of one if you have a good distribution that installs plugins for you). 4 is definitely an issue.
This is a delicate issue that we are NOT going to mess with.
Hmm. All it takes is some random unverified babblings of some company to drive you off? Even though there is no precedence for sueing end-user customers for copyright or patent infringement?
This is NOT a delicate issue. This is all very cut-and-dried. Although IANAL, I can find NO legal precedence for SCO's threat to sue end-users. They may be able to demand that people stop using Linux or pay a lincense fee, but not until they have proven in court there is copyright infringement.
And, oddly enough, the case they are taking to court has nothing to do with copyright infringement. It's a contract case, plain and simple. So we can continue to use Linux legally until such time as SCO proves that Linux code infringes their code; at that time, we can switch to another OS, or (more likely) use the "clean" code that will result from source-code cleansing that is sure to follow.
There's no delicacy here, just heavy-handed attempts at gouging unsuspecting/ignorant Linux users into paying up some "protection" money.
Unless your company distributes Linux, your company is in no danger.
But, then again, IANAL, so don't take this as legal advice. It's not.
Dude, I did basic training and AIT at Ft. Sill. If Lawton represents the rest of the state, you have a lot of explaining to do.
BWTF do I know? I live in Sitka, AK.
As annoying as telemarketing calls are, they do serve a function.
A corporate function. I'm not interested in corporate functions. If I want to talk to someone, I give them my phone number, and say, "Call me sometime. We'll do lunch."
If this is a question of free speech, then I say we get the numbers of the telemarketers, and start calling them at all hours, just to chat.
It's just free speech, after all.
Just because 50 million people believe that they shouldn't have to be bothered saying "I'm not interested." doesn't necessarily mean Congress can shut the industry down.
It's not Congress, it's the people who opt-out. Congress merely gave people the power to opt-out. How is that unfair to the industry? Hell, the industry should be glad! That's 50 Million phone calls they don't have to make because those people would have said "No" anyway.
Also, corporations do not have any fundamental "right" to exist. Corporations are charters granted by the state. Until the late 1880s in the US, the state could excersize the right to revoke a charter if it were determined that the corporation were not acting in the best interest of the citizenry.
Unfortunately, newspapers are not in the business of reporting the news, but in selling eyeballs to corporations in the form of advertising. As long as Microsoft (and other business that feel they are reliant on Microsoft products for revenue) buys ads, and Linux (or other alternatives) does not, they are going to slant the news Microsoft's direction.
Plus (to borrow from another post in a child thread), they can sell a lot more newspapers (and thus eyeballs) by saying, "Automobiles subject to rollover!" than by saying, "Some models of Foo's SUVs subject to rollover at high speeds in tight turns."
That's part of the reason the US news agencies feed into the fear culture that's been building here for the last several years.
How hard is it to install a recommended patch cluster? Not very hard at all. Download a patch fie (about 80M+ sometimes) and install it on all your machines. Sometimes you must restart the machine (when a patch touches the kernel, which is fairly regularly with recommended patches).
Sun's package management is really quite nice. All it needs is a network front-end of some sort to make it complete. (This would, of course, add a new security issue.)
And Solaris *far* outshines Linux on high-end Sun hardware. AFAIK, Linux does not handle CPU hot-swapping, for instance. In fact, in my experience, Linux is really lacking in the fault-tolerence department when compared to Solaris on Sun hardware.
With that said, Linux is moving forward very rapidly. And Sun just pissed me off (not for the first time). Although they have been good for the FOSS community in the past (NFS, NIS, RPC, Open Office, etc, etc, and of course, etc), they are quickly squandering any good-will this geek ever had for them.
I might be the only one, but I'm thinking that, come next replacement cycle, I'm gonna start swapping out Sun boxes for Linux machines.
We run our financial and medical database systems on Solaris, for exactly the reasons posted: stability, robustness, and throughput. Sun hardware is well worth the price of admission.
Solaris is also very nice, but mostly just in the way it integrates with Sun hardware, so you have hot-swap CPUs and memory, for instance (not available on all hardware).
That said: Sun is fucking up. If they think pissing off the FOSS community is going to help their sagging sales, they are grossly mistaken. Many people participating in the FOSS community also use (and purchase!) Sun equipment. Until recently, they have been walking the fine line between helping the community, and just exploiting it. Now they have crossed over.
This X1 on Ebay is starting out at $300. Might be about as cheap as you find. It's not a bad machine; it'd be worth up to $500, probably.
I do like Sun hardware, and Solaris is a good OS. I'm just disappointed with Sun's exploitation of the FOSS community, with the arrogant attitude.
One is a political ideology, the other is an economic philosophy.
Unfettered corporate capitalism leads to fascism (the state regulation of the economy) in that the state becomes a tool of the corporations, rather like you see in the USA today.
A well-structured capitalist society *requires* government intervention, for the same reasons a well-structured civil society requires government intervention (in the form of the police, and the judicial arm of the government). Even if you ignore the travesty of corporations-as-entities as practiced by the USA today, and concentrate on corporations-as-public-charters (such as the the US had before about 1880 or so), you still need regulation and monitoring. Otherwise, the biggest corporations will carry the most power, and therefore have the ability to "regulate" (in the political and economic sense) the functioning of corporations of lesser power.
This is why the US has the Sherman Act, and anti-trust laws. Now, these laws are not followed, as is evidenced by the recent anti-trust ruling against Microsoft, and the refusal by the US government to follow through on any meaningful penalty. But, even criminal law doesn't work against corporations, as seen by the recent inaction of the US government against the Enron corporation, and its executives responsible for those crimes.
The "true principals of capitalism" work no better than the true principles of communism. (*NOT* that there has been an implementation of true communism, except on extremely small scales. The most we've ever seen practiced by as large as a country is socialism.)