"Windows sucks" Results 1 - 10 of about 103,000 "Linux sucks" Results 1 - 10 of about 20 "Unix sucks" Results 1 - 10 of about 70,900 "Solaris sucks" Results 1 - 10 of about 81,400.
The answer is no. When an OSS maintainer gives up, you can still maintain the software precisely because you have the source so that there are ways of maintaining the software. There is no danger that reiserfs will break in Linux in the forseeable future, because the kernel maintainers will keep looking after it. If Hans Reiser and Namesys had kept the source code to themselves, then his users should be worried.
Knuth, as a matter of policy, refuses to read email, with the singular exception that he'll accept corrections to the Art of Computer Programming via email.
You're right that we don't have proof as to whether or not Microsoft used the royalties as a pretext for funding the SCO group. However, if you read the Halloween document I just linked to, Anderer, who was closely involved with checking the Unix and Linux codebases, said: "I realize the last negotiations are not as much fun, but Microsoft will have brough(sic) in $86 million for us including Baystar. The next deal we should be able to get from $16-20, but it will be brutial(sic) as it is for go to makerket(sic) work and some licences."
Now here we have Anderer lumping in the money that came from Baystar with money that Microsoft paid in via license fees (it's unclear whether that particular '$16-20' deal he mentions is the one we're talking about). It looks apparent to me, from the rest of the email, that this SCO employee doesn't treat the Baystar and licensing deals as being seperate payments for totally different things, but that it's part of a single campaign to tap funds from Microsoft in general.
Anyways, the fact that these payments haven't gone to Novell is now inextricably linked with the case, as they form part of Novell's counterclaims against SCO, and if Novell succeeds in having the royalties passed to Novell (or just temporarily impounded with some legal machinery called a writ of replevin) before the trial, could easily end up throwing SCO and it's barratry into the dustbin where they belong.
"According to the article, Microsoft didn't fund anything. "
You mean the article doesn't say that Microsoft funded anything. At almost the same time as the Baystar deal, Microsoft and Sun both paid SCO large amounts, totalling something like $20-30 million between them, apparently for Unix licenses of some kind. Sun obviously needed a Unix license to put out Solaris. What Microsoft did with whatever it paid SCO $millions for, seems a tad unclear.
(further to that, SCO's court filings in Utah relating to what these two amounts were for directly contradicted their own filings to the SEC, and now Novell has filed a motion for partial summary judgement claiming that 95% of this money is owed to them under the Asset Purchase Agreement that sold the Unix business to the Santa Cruz Operation. SCO only has about $10 million in cash and cash equivalents so if they win, it's game over for SCO).
Except for the fact that Goldfarb was under oath, meaning he goes to jail if he gets caught lying.
Oh, and the documentary evidence that already corroborated this story.
Mike Anderer (the person behind SCO's ludicrous claims that 'spectral analysis' showed that there was lots of Unix code in Linux) was drunk late one night and fired off a stroppy, and semi-literate, email to his paymasters complaining that HE was the person who convinced Microsoft to tell Baystar to pump SCO full of cash, and that he deserved a bonus for it. This email ended up on Eric S Raymond's desk, back when our Eric was the hotline for disgruntled Microsofties with incriminating internal documents to share.
FYI, that's NOT how it works. Bone up on the Nuremberg trials, from which the legal principles spring from. Obeying orders to commit war crimes (and invading another country is the supreme international crime) is a war crime, no matter if the government approves or not.
Well that's one way of looking at it. At the risk of godwinning myself, that condemns the US colonists, the French, Yugoslav and Soviet resistance to Nazi occupation and various other good guys to the criminal bin. In any case, resistance of this sort is NOT terrorism - terrorism is force against civilians for political purposes. In fact,the UN, in a general assembly resolution on terrorism, still affirmed the right of peoples to use force to resist racist, colonial and imperialist regimes.
Personally I'm of the opinion that if you are in someone else's country illegally as a member of an occupying army, then it's right, proper and decent of the local population to take potshots at you for any reason they so desire, but this is heading down the road of offtopic flamebait so I'll stop here.
For the record, Under Siege (and Under Ash, the other game by the same people) don't condone terrorist actions, focusing instead on attacks on the Israeli IDF, which is illegally occupying several other countries. (Attacking on-duty soldiers is warfare, not terrorism, by most definitions of the word).
In fact, killing civilians ends the game instantly; the game is far MORE sensitive to charges of terrorism than many pro-American so-called anti-terrorist tactical FPSes.
The Linux and OSX versions will come later. Their site mentioned that a random guess would be November or so for both. Owners of the Windows version can use a downloadable Linux binary...
Mighty inconsiderate of you guys to help slashdot introversion's servers into a smoking wreck, at exactly the same time everyone who pre-ordered is trying to download their damn game...
Obviously you're unaware of Wallace vs FSF and Wallace vs IBM, RedHat and Novell, where some net.kook called Daniel Wallace alleged the GPL was an antitrust violation. He lost because his "case" was so ludicrious it couldn't even get into a courtroom, although the stupid cunt has wasted a pile of money and time and effort in appealing to the Seventh Circuit.
The Judge in the FSF case even said: "[The GPL] acts as a means by which certain software may be copied, modified and redistributed without violating the software's copyright protection. As such, the GPL encourages, rather than discourages, free competition and the distribution of computer operating systems, the benefits of which directly pass to consumers. These benefits include lower prices, better access and more innovation." and the IBM judge was similarly positive about it.
SCO vs IBM is likely to involve some GPL-related shenanigans in the near future too...
It's the same story all right (looks like the Sunday Times of London got there first) but I don't see any evidence of cutting or pasting, and I didn't spot any duplicated quotes either.
Perhaps being a Slashdotter means you're a bit overeager to cry 'dupe'...
You misunderstand me. The GPL is a grant of rights, not a restriction. It's not 'less restrictive', since it's not restrictive at all. What restricts you is copyright law. It's impossible to be sued, at least in the US, for breaching the GPL. The restrictions all come from copyright law, and if you breach the GPL, you'll be sued for a breach of copyright.
Compared to the extreme permissive licenses like the MIT or BSD licenses, the GPL lifts less of the restrictions placed by copyright law, though. You don't get the right to restore the copyright law restrictions that the GPL lifted, for one. It also lets copyright law bar you from distributing binary-only copies in order to make it impractical to modify the software.
While there are plenty of good reasons why people might prefer thoes licenses, it strikes me that bitching about not having those rights, in the name of freedom, is a bit like a southern US plantation owner complaining about the loss of his freedom to own slaves...
Though your sense of entitlement seems to be a tad overwhelming.
The GPL is a license that grants users far more rights than copyright law would normally allow. The alleged infringer here was in no sense restricted by the GPL; it gave him a bunch of rights that he had under certain conditions, and that he wouldn't otherwise have had under copyright law, and he is alleged to have broken those conditions while exercising the rights. If your uncle lets you live in his house rent-free as long as you don't have any pets, then he is entitled to use the law to evict you and your ferret when he finds out you've breached the terms. Bitching about it just makes you look like a spoiled brat.
If you want to complain about restrictions in software licenses, try some proprietary licenses which bind you under contractual terms that force you to give up MORE rights than the ones that copyright law takes away from you. You're not allowed to reverse engineer Windows or sue Microsoft, for example, if you use their software.
Hey, he's not the evil lord of darkness for his CDDL switch, although the mixing of CDDL and GPL code together and lying about how it's allowed does suggest satanic tendencies.
Jörg is the evil lord of darkness for his DVD fork of cdrecord, called cdrecord.ProDVD, which has the most egregiously fascist licensing restrictions ever. Basically, every few months, you have to go over to Jörgy's site and beg for a license key otherwise your DVD burner just stops working. If he gets hit by a bus, or his site goes down or you lose internet access or he decides to be even more of a control-freak asshole than he is already, then you're out of luck and the software stops working. Not only that, but the fucker uses cdrecord to brag that the proDVD patch is the bee's knees and that the other DVD burners are buggy unofficial pieces of crap. That way naïve users fall into his trap and actually download and use this fascist trash, thereby depriving themselves of freedom 0 almost as soon as they manage to liberate themselves from Windows. xcdroast compounds the error by recommending it too, fuckers.
cdrecord.ProDVD does a great job of making its users helpless and dependent. Worst.Software. Ever. -10.5/10
Yes it does. You want to take a look at 17 USC 110. It starts off thus:
"Notwithstanding the provisions of section 106, the following are not infringements of copyright:
(1) performance or display of a work by instructors or pupils in the course of face-to-face teaching activities of a nonprofit educational institution, in a classroom or similar place devoted to instruction, unless, in the case of a motion picture or other audiovisual work, the performance, or the display of individual images, is given by means of a copy that was not lawfully made under this title, and that the person responsible for the performance knew or had reason to believe was not lawfully made; "
and continues in much the same vein for a while. Note that interpreting this verbiage so that you know your rights exactly would require access to case law and a legal professional...
Erm, hardly. Linus didn't really drop BitKeeper; he was pushed. Larry McVoy stopped letting Open Source developers use the Bitkeeper software for free, because Andrew Tridgell decided to try making a competing free (speechwise) software client that operated with the BitKeeper server. Apparently McVoy really, really, doesn't like competition.
The people who objected to the use of Bitkeeper were proved right all along, on purely practical grounds; it's absolutely foolish for you to depend on software which can be pulled away from you at the whim of one person or one company. If I was a builder, there's no way on earth I'd use bricks, or tools, that would turn to dust if if the manufacturer decides to press a red button on the CEO's desk. That would be a disaster waiting to happen. Software is no different.
What you called 'zealots' here are really pragmatists.
Erm, although 'Unix' is the heading, if you RTFA, you'll find that he's actually specifying BSD 4.3. He also explains reasons why Excel is picked, not Lotus or Visicalc.
I stand corrected on point 2 (I was misled by a visit to the OpenBSD site and not finding non-GNUed compilers or libraries.
However, the FSF definition of 'Free Software' most definitely includes non-copyleft licenses, and on that score you're utterly dead wrong. Go to fsf.org and check up.
Slashdot Mirror
"Windows sucks" Results 1 - 10 of about 103,000
"Linux sucks" Results 1 - 10 of about 20
"Unix sucks" Results 1 - 10 of about 70,900
"Solaris sucks" Results 1 - 10 of about 81,400.
Erm,I said Reiserfs. Reiserfs is already part of the kernel. Reiser4 isn't, yet.
The answer is no. When an OSS maintainer gives up, you can still maintain the software precisely because you have the source so that there are ways of maintaining the software. There is no danger that reiserfs will break in Linux in the forseeable future, because the kernel maintainers will keep looking after it. If Hans Reiser and Namesys had kept the source code to themselves, then his users should be worried.
Knuth, as a matter of policy, refuses to read email, with the singular exception that he'll accept corrections to the Art of Computer Programming via email.
Programming Pearls by Jon Bentley and Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs by Sussman, Abelson and Sussman were both mentioned twice too.
You're right that we don't have proof as to whether or not Microsoft used the royalties as a pretext for funding the SCO group. However, if you read the Halloween document I just linked to, Anderer, who was closely involved with checking the Unix and Linux codebases, said:
"I realize the last negotiations are not as much fun, but Microsoft will have brough(sic) in $86 million for us including Baystar. The next deal we should be able to get from $16-20, but it will be brutial(sic) as it is for go to makerket(sic) work and some licences."
Now here we have Anderer lumping in the money that came from Baystar with money that Microsoft paid in via license fees (it's unclear whether that particular '$16-20' deal he mentions is the one we're talking about). It looks apparent to me, from the rest of the email, that this SCO employee doesn't treat the Baystar and licensing deals as being seperate payments for totally different things, but that it's part of a single campaign to tap funds from Microsoft in general.
Anyways, the fact that these payments haven't gone to Novell is now inextricably linked with the case, as they form part of Novell's counterclaims against SCO, and if Novell succeeds in having the royalties passed to Novell (or just temporarily impounded with some legal machinery called a writ of replevin) before the trial, could easily end up throwing SCO and it's barratry into the dustbin where they belong.
"According to the article, Microsoft didn't fund anything. "
You mean the article doesn't say that Microsoft funded anything. At almost the same time as the Baystar deal, Microsoft and Sun both paid SCO large amounts, totalling something like $20-30 million between them, apparently for Unix licenses of some kind. Sun obviously needed a Unix license to put out Solaris. What Microsoft did with whatever it paid SCO $millions for, seems a tad unclear.
(further to that, SCO's court filings in Utah relating to what these two amounts were for directly contradicted their own filings to the SEC, and now Novell has filed a motion for partial summary judgement claiming that 95% of this money is owed to them under the Asset Purchase Agreement that sold the Unix business to the Santa Cruz Operation. SCO only has about $10 million in cash and cash equivalents so if they win, it's game over for SCO).
Except for the fact that Goldfarb was under oath, meaning he goes to jail if he gets caught lying.
Oh, and the documentary evidence that already corroborated this story.
Mike Anderer (the person behind SCO's ludicrous claims that 'spectral analysis' showed that there was lots of Unix code in Linux) was drunk late one night and fired off a stroppy, and semi-literate, email to his paymasters complaining that HE was the person who convinced Microsoft to tell Baystar to pump SCO full of cash, and that he deserved a bonus for it. This email ended up on Eric S Raymond's desk, back when our Eric was the hotline for disgruntled Microsofties with incriminating internal documents to share.
Read all about it here
FYI, that's NOT how it works. Bone up on the Nuremberg trials, from which the legal principles spring from. Obeying orders to commit war crimes (and invading another country is the supreme international crime) is a war crime, no matter if the government approves or not.
Well that's one way of looking at it. At the risk of godwinning myself, that condemns the US colonists, the French, Yugoslav and Soviet resistance to Nazi occupation and various other good guys to the criminal bin. In any case, resistance of this sort is NOT terrorism - terrorism is force against civilians for political purposes. In fact,the UN, in a general assembly resolution on terrorism, still affirmed the right of peoples to use force to resist racist, colonial and imperialist regimes.
Personally I'm of the opinion that if you are in someone else's country illegally as a member of an occupying army, then it's right, proper and decent of the local population to take potshots at you for any reason they so desire, but this is heading down the road of offtopic flamebait so I'll stop here.
For the record, Under Siege (and Under Ash, the other game by the same people) don't condone terrorist actions, focusing instead on attacks on the Israeli IDF, which is illegally occupying several other countries. (Attacking on-duty soldiers is warfare, not terrorism, by most definitions of the word).
In fact, killing civilians ends the game instantly; the game is far MORE sensitive to charges of terrorism than many pro-American so-called anti-terrorist tactical FPSes.
The Linux and OSX versions will come later. Their site mentioned that a random guess would be November or so for both. Owners of the Windows version can use a downloadable Linux binary...
Mighty inconsiderate of you guys to help slashdot introversion's servers into a smoking wreck, at exactly the same time everyone who pre-ordered is trying to download their damn game...
Obviously you're unaware of Wallace vs FSF and Wallace vs IBM, RedHat and Novell, where some net.kook called Daniel Wallace alleged the GPL was an antitrust violation. He lost because his "case" was so ludicrious it couldn't even get into a courtroom, although the stupid cunt has wasted a pile of money and time and effort in appealing to the Seventh Circuit.
The Judge in the FSF case even said:
"[The GPL] acts as a means by which certain software may be copied, modified and redistributed without violating the software's copyright protection. As such, the GPL encourages, rather than discourages, free competition and the distribution of computer operating systems, the benefits of which directly pass to consumers. These benefits include lower prices, better access and more innovation."
and the IBM judge was similarly positive about it.
SCO vs IBM is likely to involve some GPL-related shenanigans in the near future too...
It's the same story all right (looks like the Sunday Times of London got there first) but I don't see any evidence of cutting or pasting, and I didn't spot any duplicated quotes either.
Perhaps being a Slashdotter means you're a bit overeager to cry 'dupe'...
You misunderstand me. The GPL is a grant of rights, not a restriction. It's not 'less restrictive', since it's not restrictive at all. What restricts you is copyright law. It's impossible to be sued, at least in the US, for breaching the GPL. The restrictions all come from copyright law, and if you breach the GPL, you'll be sued for a breach of copyright.
Compared to the extreme permissive licenses like the MIT or BSD licenses, the GPL lifts less of the restrictions placed by copyright law, though. You don't get the right to restore the copyright law restrictions that the GPL lifted, for one. It also lets copyright law bar you from distributing binary-only copies in order to make it impractical to modify the software.
While there are plenty of good reasons why people might prefer thoes licenses, it strikes me that bitching about not having those rights, in the name of freedom, is a bit like a southern US plantation owner complaining about the loss of his freedom to own slaves...
Exactly, dude. That's what copyright law is for.
Though your sense of entitlement seems to be a tad overwhelming.
The GPL is a license that grants users far more rights than copyright law would normally allow. The alleged infringer here was in no sense restricted by the GPL; it gave him a bunch of rights that he had under certain conditions, and that he wouldn't otherwise have had under copyright law, and he is alleged to have broken those conditions while exercising the rights.
If your uncle lets you live in his house rent-free as long as you don't have any pets, then he is entitled to use the law to evict you and your ferret when he finds out you've breached the terms. Bitching about it just makes you look like a spoiled brat.
If you want to complain about restrictions in software licenses, try some proprietary licenses which bind you under contractual terms that force you to give up MORE rights than the ones that copyright law takes away from you. You're not allowed to reverse engineer Windows or sue Microsoft, for example, if you use their software.
I don't use the proprietary flash player, but the video played fine in VLC, after I downloaded it with a handly little script called 'youtube-dl'
Hey, he's not the evil lord of darkness for his CDDL switch, although the mixing of CDDL and GPL code together and lying about how it's allowed does suggest satanic tendencies.
Jörg is the evil lord of darkness for his DVD fork of cdrecord, called cdrecord.ProDVD, which has the most egregiously fascist licensing restrictions ever. Basically, every few months, you have to go over to Jörgy's site and beg for a license key otherwise your DVD burner just stops working. If he gets hit by a bus, or his site goes down or you lose internet access or he decides to be even more of a control-freak asshole than he is already, then you're out of luck and the software stops working.
Not only that, but the fucker uses cdrecord to brag that the proDVD patch is the bee's knees and that the other DVD burners are buggy unofficial pieces of crap. That way naïve users fall into his trap and actually download and use this fascist trash, thereby depriving themselves of freedom 0 almost as soon as they manage to liberate themselves from Windows. xcdroast compounds the error by recommending it too, fuckers.
cdrecord.ProDVD does a great job of making its users helpless and dependent. Worst.Software. Ever. -10.5/10
Yes it does. You want to take a look at 17 USC 110. It starts off thus:
"Notwithstanding the provisions of section 106, the following are not infringements of copyright:
(1) performance or display of a work by instructors or pupils in the course of face-to-face teaching activities of a nonprofit educational institution, in a classroom or similar place devoted to instruction, unless, in the case of a motion picture or other audiovisual work, the performance, or the display of individual images, is given by means of a copy that was not lawfully made under this title, and that the person responsible for the performance knew or had reason to believe was not lawfully made; "
and continues in much the same vein for a while. Note that interpreting this verbiage so that you know your rights exactly would require access to case law and a legal professional...
Erm, hardly. Linus didn't really drop BitKeeper; he was pushed. Larry McVoy stopped letting Open Source developers use the Bitkeeper software for free, because Andrew Tridgell decided to try making a competing free (speechwise) software client that operated with the BitKeeper server. Apparently McVoy really, really, doesn't like competition.
The people who objected to the use of Bitkeeper were proved right all along, on purely practical grounds; it's absolutely foolish for you to depend on software which can be pulled away from you at the whim of one person or one company. If I was a builder, there's no way on earth I'd use bricks, or tools, that would turn to dust if if the manufacturer decides to press a red button on the CEO's desk. That would be a disaster waiting to happen. Software is no different.
What you called 'zealots' here are really pragmatists.
You do realise that IBM are in court right now, for the heinous crime of taking large gobs of its own AIX code and putting it in Linux, aren't you?
Erm, although 'Unix' is the heading, if you RTFA, you'll find that he's actually specifying BSD 4.3. He also explains reasons why Excel is picked, not Lotus or Visicalc.
I stand corrected on point 2 (I was misled by a visit to the OpenBSD site and not finding non-GNUed compilers or libraries.
However, the FSF definition of 'Free Software' most definitely includes non-copyleft licenses, and on that score you're utterly dead wrong. Go to fsf.org and check up.
Who's attampting to 'take Linus' freedom to choose away from him?'. People are disagreeing with him.
Criticism isn't censorship, silly. If it is, you've just censored us!