Whatever he donates for vaccination gets spent on his own pharma company, which makes vaccines.
Whatever he donates in software, he donates through Microsoft. They get a tax writedown on the full wholesale price of the software (and sometimes retail), not on what it cost to make and donate.
There's more like this. Look harder.
So for a lot of those donations, he's getting a tax writedown, good publicity, and most of his money back, to boot.
But wait, there's more!
If he donates for vaccines and someone (typically the UN) matches his donation (typically dollar for dollar), he will actually get more money back through his pharma co's than he gave away. Here it is, in sequence:
give away money to yourself under an alias
have someone match your donation
profit!
"But," you may argue, "the AIDS sufferers get vaccinated, don't they?" Sorry, they don't.
They die waiting for Bill and Co to get around to shipping them vaccines while at the same time the US government (prompted by...?) tells countries who are prepared to make and ship vaccines at a far lower price not to do it else they face economic sanctions under TRIPS laws (just like they told Peru and Argentina that if they did't buy Microsoft software, there would be economic sanctions).
On top of this, because Bill and Co jack up the price of the vaccines to many times the price that the country I have in mind was offering them for, fewer AIDS sufferers get vaccinated than if Bill and Co didn't exist.
But wait! There's more... much more... is it worth posting that here? Dollars to doughnuts you're going to keep right on believing that Bill's all shiny and clean and generous at heart, and not the cold, calculating, desperately greedy control freak he's always been. Read up on some of his history, sucker, and not at microsoft.com
Competitors exist, but this does not mean that those competitors have any control. Monopoly does not necessarily mean you're the only one standing, it means that you're the only one in control.
The courts didn't find MS guilty of being a monopoly as such, they found them guilty of abusing monopolistic power.
This MS continues to do. My problem with the courts is not that they officially slapped MS down, but that they didn't convict them of enough of their unfair practices, didn't deprive them of the fruits of their crimes at all, and the penalties which were applied barely even rate at "wrist slap" - and MS complained about them anyway.
And even if they'd been fined fifty billion dollars up front in one lump, they could have paid that out of cash and kept right on trucking with the tens of billions in cash that they had left over. Fifty BILLION dollars! Fifty billion DOLLARS! FIFTY billion dollars! (think of "Twins") Chump change, and they didn't even lose that. Many of their competitors were tricked or bullied out of EVERYTHING THEY HAD. Where is their recompense?
And some toff wants the instigator of this knighted!
Bill Gates regularly tells his audiences that he's "the smartest man in the world". Poor Trey. I guess he's trying to achieve that in the same way that he achieved market dominance: by lying long and loud, and buying/trashing anyone who disagrees.
MS has been convicted of crime in both a US and two German courts that I know of (and probably others). When you consider how hard a corporation has to try to get itself slapped down in the USA these days, that says a lot. If you actually look at the evidence which was submitted to the US circus, you'd expect someone like Al Capone to be pushing for his knighthood, not QE2. If you include stuff that was disallowed on technical grounds, you start looking for a convenient wall to stand the man against. Then if you examine what his other companies are also doing, you don't wait to find a wall.
I don't use Evolution, but I'm glad someone wrote it. Now gazillions of Outlook users have a platform which can look and feel very much like what they "drive" now, but fundamentally different internally, and from a manufacturer who puts less draconian conditions on the use of their product. And random street kids can't reprogram a remote control to stop or blow up your car as you pass. (-:
One of the problems I have with just cloning existing apps, as well as limiting your horizons plus all of the (IMESHO) silly look-and-feel, branding and "intellectual property" (the term makes me think of racks and racks of brains with price tags) risks, is very similar to your beef, and can be exemplified by car engines.
If you lift the engine out of a modern Toyota Corolla (I'm sure there are corresponding car models all over the world) there are still vestiges of the engines they started with nearly thirty years ago. They're not so obvious up front, but if you took a 1975 Corolla motor (I think it was called something like a "2Y" motor), and a 1978 Corolla motor, and compared them side by side, you'd be hard pressed to pick many differences once you'd torn the embryonic emission gear off. However, inside the motor the pistons are a slightly different shape (the newer motor has longer travel and lighter pistons), the little push-rods that drive the cams are a different length, and because the piston skirts are a different shape they had to redesign a lot of the stuff around the crankshaft just a little bit and everything is very slightly different and almost totally incompatible. The situation is the same between that model and the next, and so on.
There is no way you can take a 1988 Corolla piston and hope to repair a 1975 Corolla motor with it. But this need not have been so. If Toyota had sighted along the lines of progress before 1975, they could have kept most of the parts compatible through to at least 1988. You could take a 1988 Corolla piston, bolt (well, pin and circlip) it into a 1975 Corolla motor, maybe drill out the counterweight on the camshaft a bit to cater for the lighter piston, and crank 'er up.
With modern and particularly Open Source software, this is much less true. You can quite often recompile a 2000 GUI application to take advantage of a 2004 HTML widget with very little hammering and sawing, and if your ancient non-network-aware app happened to be using the right library, recompiling it against newer libraries would automatically gain the ability to fetch from and dump to URLs instead of boring old local files.
This is valuable from your perspective, because it allows you to "replace the number-plate separator", albeit a chunk at a time, but risky from your perspective because doing it a chunk at a time instead of en-bloc might limit the scope of changes you can make.
I still contend that the minimum-disruption approach is extremely valuable, even if some of the chunks have to be redone several times in order to get the revolution you seek, because you carry your userbase along with you. Many developers regard a userbase as a support problem, but they're also a valuable testing resource and unless you're writing an app purely for your own pleasure you will be playing to an audience of some kind anyway.
People should stop wasting their time on a poor replicated version of an already poor clone of someone else's product (in this case, Microsoft). Instead they should focus on coming up with something that's actually new, or at least improved.
I agree 110%, MS-BloatWare is like unto a sea anchor as far as innovation goes.
But... however sad it makes us, we must also cater for existing users. Think of trying to convince Ford drivers to switch to your brand of car. If the vehicle you're selling looks like something Mad Max might drive (the linked car is in fact based on a Ford XB Coupe, itself unique to Oz), you're only going to get a sale from a very few maniac buyers. If, on the other hand, it looks like a different kind of Ford, a much bigger slice of your market is going to stand still long enough for you to sell them one.
The money Bill donates mostly comes back to him through his own pharma companies (which have a headlock on the AIDS vaccine in question) leaving him with cheap publicity - and if other groups are chipping in dollar-for-dollar or somesuch he might actually take out more than he puts in, too.
Meanwhile, his strong support for TRIPS legislation has prevented at least one other country from making and shipping cheap and effective AIDS vaccine to Africa. This not only multiplies the cost but also delays the introduction of a cure (and, BTW, condoms won't have a serious impact on the AIDS problem(s)).
So yes, since though his profit-maximising actions thousands of people continue to die every day (roughly one Detroit or one Sydney per year - that we account for) through the same taint of greed which has ploughed up the software industry, buggered many IT standards and seen virus writing become a popular sport for the last twenty or so years, I'd feel somewhat obliged to "wine and cry" about it.
Come out and post, Coward! I'll shred your arguments and invade your browser, you... you... Internet Exploder user. (-:
They seem to do a pretty effective job of chopping out spam, and they don't require you to submit to Trey's patented (soon if not now) technology and centralised-at-Microsoft you-must-join-Passport "stamps" idea.
When I loaded the story the banner was Microsoft bragging on a "completely rewritten" MS-FrontPage and one of the feature points was XML. No doubt that this is or will soon be XML with quirks in it patented by Microsoft, meaning that in effect they own your websites, every page of them. RTFEULA.
The other thing about stamps is that we don't control their price - and what inevitably happens if stamps are only available through a single provider, let alone one that happens to make 95% of the email clients which potentially use said stamps? The rimshot to that particular joke is that said provider is already a huge convicted monopolist and actively (and generally successfully) working to both extend their monopolies and frustrate any attempt to remedy the situation.
The only thing which seems to slow them down is decentralised distributed-intelligence passive-resistance social phonomena like Open Source.
I don't have a copy of MS-Windows to my name, and we use no Microsoft software in this house (but can run (e.g.) PhotoShop if we want to, hurrah for the WINE team). This kind of invalidates your main point, which is that "we all depend on Microsoft". You also need to face and eventualy accept that the only reason "we all depend on" Microsoft is because their product tying, bribery, back-room kick-back/extortion deals and other unfair (sometimes criminal) practices have succeeded.
It's important to realise that these practices are not a thing of the past, Microsoft continues to do them. Witness them patenting an MS-Office file format which they sold to everyone as open and portable (and it wasn't portable anyway, since they put binary data within a text file), all of this while they've been directed by a court to open their Ofice formats up as a consequence of being convicted as a corporate criminal.
You don't have to "find" a hundred reasons to whine about Microsoft, that's already been done by Microsoft themselves. What you do have to do to avoid being sad about Microsoft is stick your head in the sand.
Telling it to listen only on the lo/127.0.0.1 interface seems to do that quite nicely. The "-nolisten tcp" option to X shuts down TCP listening completely (your apps then connect to X through a Unix socket), if you prefer that.
Presuming that Xnest is included in your X installation and you are running a display manager (kdm, gdm or xdm for example), this will open a 1024x768 window and display a login prompt within it. You can then log in (either as the same user or as a completely different user) and use a web browser on a 1024x768 screen even though your screen is 2560x2048.
My sister-in-law uses this to see what the pages in her forthcoming web site would look like to someone browsing at that res. Her comment on 640x480 was "What is this? A thumbnail?" (-:
In short, why bother being merely as good as MS-Windows? As well as doing everything that it does, we should take note of useful things which are easy for us and impossible for the convicted monopolist.
With Xnest, as well as opening a session at a different resolution, you can also open one at a different depth. If the hardware supports it, it will be done directly otherwise it will be emulated. You can see how horrid you app looks in 16 colours, greyscale or black-and-white. If the Xnest session is larger than your physical screen, you can scroll around and see it all in chunks as big as your hardware allows.
If you want to put an MS-Windows session on your screen rdesktop 1.3 or later does full RDPv5 protocol, all depths and resolutions (plus sound, if you don't mind kissing your bandwidth farewell). If you want a copy of someone else's screen, use x2x. If you want to display stuff at a resolution or depth which you don't have, or in batch without toucing your video hardware, use Xv - take 4096x4096 screenshots on your S3-Virge-equipped machine, knock yourself out. Or use Xvnc and display to a VNC client only. And so on. I'm waiting for Xrdp to appear. (-:
(This is a forward-looking statement, so I might be lying to you). Educate enough sharetraders and the stock'll either nosedive or the fraudulent manipulation will become so obvious that the appropriate authorities will be embarrassed into shutting them down, with prejudice.
Leave it up for the good of society at large: don't base your decision on how many losers leech and profit, base it on how many sysadmins who are too flat-out to blink (let alone figure out how to send you money) have had their lives bettered by your efforts.
After the flood, no raindrop wants to admin responsibility.
Perhaps his users should have picked up a copy of The Cathedral and the Bazaar. They are not owed software.
My sentiments, too, although I would have at least left the pieces up on a server somewhere.
I have all kinds of bizarre little projects of my own kicking around, and I try to never obselete them; every so often (maybe 3 or 4 times a year) someone emails me to say "thanks for that great little utility" and I have to mail back and say "which one?" because the thing is so trivial and long-forgotten that I have a snowflake's chance in Sudan of guessing right. It's not as if one download a week is going to be expensive.
Ending support is fine, but I think throwing a hissy fit is a bit over the top. Others will think differently.
You give something away, you shouldn't ever expect anything back.
Yes, otherwise it's an offer of trade, not a gift.
Personally, I'd rather have one message in my inbox about 5 reasons why my software sucks than 100 messages about reasons why it rocks.
Not so sure about this one. I find error reports more useful but if few to none are also saying thanks then I'm probably missing the mark somewhere.
One more thing, if he made this an open source project and is now hording the source, that is just wrong.
True, except that he's under no obligation to continue providing the source if he ceases providing the binaries, and being the original (and apparently sole) author, he has every right to change the licence arrangements. What he has no right to do is to reach back out and demand that people stop using his source if he ever open-sourced it.
Also, you have no right to demand that he be happy or generous, only reasonable and not rude. And "reasonable" most definitely does not mean "agreeable".
The long and the short of this is that if you find a copy of his code with a FOSS licence, by all means go ahead and use it according to the terms of the licence, set up a community, make it world-famous, knock yourself out - but he has no obligation to support it or you at all.
...that I know of, and I'd be helpless if it did because I'm pretty busy already.
I did get a couple of new enquiries from potential recruits, which is far more valuable to me. Linux is blossoming in Oz (at last!) and I have more work than people to do it. If I can get more people onto the coalface, I'll have time for stuff like this posting, family time, writing software I want to write rather than stuff I need to write to solve an immediate problem. And I'll be able to provide service to more of the Perth IT community, which badly needs it.
SCO ANZ didn't make this particular standover play until the 19th, at which point I was on a Qantas 737-400 over the Nullarbor somewhere, out of contact with Linus and next port of call at least 2000km from Adelaide.
But yes, Linus did say that on the previous Friday, and not just to me, to a bunch of people standing outside Elder Hall discussing the OCG miniconf's outcome. No press release, Linus is like that.
Three cacheable images per typical page, minimal scripting, no worries. But the link was totally trashed, which was sad for the other people using it. I've put a box up on a home DSL line and pointed the DNS at it for a few days.
It's still gold-on-black because I got sick of black-on-white. (-:
Actually, if you look closely, the original background is not exactly black. It's a very dark image of Tux overlaid on a CPU core.
Slashdot Mirror
Whatever he donates in software, he donates through Microsoft. They get a tax writedown on the full wholesale price of the software (and sometimes retail), not on what it cost to make and donate.
There's more like this. Look harder.
So for a lot of those donations, he's getting a tax writedown, good publicity, and most of his money back, to boot.
But wait, there's more!
If he donates for vaccines and someone (typically the UN) matches his donation (typically dollar for dollar), he will actually get more money back through his pharma co's than he gave away. Here it is, in sequence:
"But," you may argue, "the AIDS sufferers get vaccinated, don't they?" Sorry, they don't.
They die waiting for Bill and Co to get around to shipping them vaccines while at the same time the US government (prompted by...?) tells countries who are prepared to make and ship vaccines at a far lower price not to do it else they face economic sanctions under TRIPS laws (just like they told Peru and Argentina that if they did't buy Microsoft software, there would be economic sanctions).
On top of this, because Bill and Co jack up the price of the vaccines to many times the price that the country I have in mind was offering them for, fewer AIDS sufferers get vaccinated than if Bill and Co didn't exist.
But wait! There's more... much more... is it worth posting that here? Dollars to doughnuts you're going to keep right on believing that Bill's all shiny and clean and generous at heart, and not the cold, calculating, desperately greedy control freak he's always been. Read up on some of his history, sucker, and not at microsoft.com
Competitors exist, but this does not mean that those competitors have any control. Monopoly does not necessarily mean you're the only one standing, it means that you're the only one in control.
The courts didn't find MS guilty of being a monopoly as such, they found them guilty of abusing monopolistic power.
This MS continues to do. My problem with the courts is not that they officially slapped MS down, but that they didn't convict them of enough of their unfair practices, didn't deprive them of the fruits of their crimes at all, and the penalties which were applied barely even rate at "wrist slap" - and MS complained about them anyway.
And even if they'd been fined fifty billion dollars up front in one lump, they could have paid that out of cash and kept right on trucking with the tens of billions in cash that they had left over. Fifty BILLION dollars! Fifty billion DOLLARS! FIFTY billion dollars! (think of "Twins") Chump change, and they didn't even lose that. Many of their competitors were tricked or bullied out of EVERYTHING THEY HAD. Where is their recompense?
And some toff wants the instigator of this knighted!
Bill Gates regularly tells his audiences that he's "the smartest man in the world". Poor Trey. I guess he's trying to achieve that in the same way that he achieved market dominance: by lying long and loud, and buying/trashing anyone who disagrees.
MS has been convicted of crime in both a US and two German courts that I know of (and probably others). When you consider how hard a corporation has to try to get itself slapped down in the USA these days, that says a lot. If you actually look at the evidence which was submitted to the US circus, you'd expect someone like Al Capone to be pushing for his knighthood, not QE2. If you include stuff that was disallowed on technical grounds, you start looking for a convenient wall to stand the man against. Then if you examine what his other companies are also doing, you don't wait to find a wall.
I don't use Evolution, but I'm glad someone wrote it. Now gazillions of Outlook users have a platform which can look and feel very much like what they "drive" now, but fundamentally different internally, and from a manufacturer who puts less draconian conditions on the use of their product. And random street kids can't reprogram a remote control to stop or blow up your car as you pass. (-:
One of the problems I have with just cloning existing apps, as well as limiting your horizons plus all of the (IMESHO) silly look-and-feel, branding and "intellectual property" (the term makes me think of racks and racks of brains with price tags) risks, is very similar to your beef, and can be exemplified by car engines.
If you lift the engine out of a modern Toyota Corolla (I'm sure there are corresponding car models all over the world) there are still vestiges of the engines they started with nearly thirty years ago. They're not so obvious up front, but if you took a 1975 Corolla motor (I think it was called something like a "2Y" motor), and a 1978 Corolla motor, and compared them side by side, you'd be hard pressed to pick many differences once you'd torn the embryonic emission gear off. However, inside the motor the pistons are a slightly different shape (the newer motor has longer travel and lighter pistons), the little push-rods that drive the cams are a different length, and because the piston skirts are a different shape they had to redesign a lot of the stuff around the crankshaft just a little bit and everything is very slightly different and almost totally incompatible. The situation is the same between that model and the next, and so on.
There is no way you can take a 1988 Corolla piston and hope to repair a 1975 Corolla motor with it. But this need not have been so. If Toyota had sighted along the lines of progress before 1975, they could have kept most of the parts compatible through to at least 1988. You could take a 1988 Corolla piston, bolt (well, pin and circlip) it into a 1975 Corolla motor, maybe drill out the counterweight on the camshaft a bit to cater for the lighter piston, and crank 'er up.
With modern and particularly Open Source software, this is much less true. You can quite often recompile a 2000 GUI application to take advantage of a 2004 HTML widget with very little hammering and sawing, and if your ancient non-network-aware app happened to be using the right library, recompiling it against newer libraries would automatically gain the ability to fetch from and dump to URLs instead of boring old local files.
This is valuable from your perspective, because it allows you to "replace the number-plate separator", albeit a chunk at a time, but risky from your perspective because doing it a chunk at a time instead of en-bloc might limit the scope of changes you can make.
I still contend that the minimum-disruption approach is extremely valuable, even if some of the chunks have to be redone several times in order to get the revolution you seek, because you carry your userbase along with you. Many developers regard a userbase as a support problem, but they're also a valuable testing resource and unless you're writing an app purely for your own pleasure you will be playing to an audience of some kind anyway.
I agree 110%, MS-BloatWare is like unto a sea anchor as far as innovation goes.
But... however sad it makes us, we must also cater for existing users. Think of trying to convince Ford drivers to switch to your brand of car. If the vehicle you're selling looks like something Mad Max might drive (the linked car is in fact based on a Ford XB Coupe, itself unique to Oz), you're only going to get a sale from a very few maniac buyers. If, on the other hand, it looks like a different kind of Ford, a much bigger slice of your market is going to stand still long enough for you to sell them one.
Sorry, almost forgot...
The money Bill donates mostly comes back to him through his own pharma companies (which have a headlock on the AIDS vaccine in question) leaving him with cheap publicity - and if other groups are chipping in dollar-for-dollar or somesuch he might actually take out more than he puts in, too.
Meanwhile, his strong support for TRIPS legislation has prevented at least one other country from making and shipping cheap and effective AIDS vaccine to Africa. This not only multiplies the cost but also delays the introduction of a cure (and, BTW, condoms won't have a serious impact on the AIDS problem(s)).
So yes, since though his profit-maximising actions thousands of people continue to die every day (roughly one Detroit or one Sydney per year - that we account for) through the same taint of greed which has ploughed up the software industry, buggered many IT standards and seen virus writing become a popular sport for the last twenty or so years, I'd feel somewhat obliged to "wine and cry" about it.
Come out and post, Coward! I'll shred your arguments and invade your browser, you... you... Internet Exploder user. (-:
They seem to do a pretty effective job of chopping out spam, and they don't require you to submit to Trey's patented (soon if not now) technology and centralised-at-Microsoft you-must-join-Passport "stamps" idea.
When I loaded the story the banner was Microsoft bragging on a "completely rewritten" MS-FrontPage and one of the feature points was XML. No doubt that this is or will soon be XML with quirks in it patented by Microsoft, meaning that in effect they own your websites, every page of them. RTFEULA.
The other thing about stamps is that we don't control their price - and what inevitably happens if stamps are only available through a single provider, let alone one that happens to make 95% of the email clients which potentially use said stamps? The rimshot to that particular joke is that said provider is already a huge convicted monopolist and actively (and generally successfully) working to both extend their monopolies and frustrate any attempt to remedy the situation.
The only thing which seems to slow them down is decentralised distributed-intelligence passive-resistance social phonomena like Open Source.
I don't have an XboX but our local Linux User Group's web pages are served from one, running Linux of course.
I don't have a copy of MS-Windows to my name, and we use no Microsoft software in this house (but can run (e.g.) PhotoShop if we want to, hurrah for the WINE team). This kind of invalidates your main point, which is that "we all depend on Microsoft". You also need to face and eventualy accept that the only reason "we all depend on" Microsoft is because their product tying, bribery, back-room kick-back/extortion deals and other unfair (sometimes criminal) practices have succeeded.
It's important to realise that these practices are not a thing of the past, Microsoft continues to do them. Witness them patenting an MS-Office file format which they sold to everyone as open and portable (and it wasn't portable anyway, since they put binary data within a text file), all of this while they've been directed by a court to open their Ofice formats up as a consequence of being convicted as a corporate criminal.
You don't have to "find" a hundred reasons to whine about Microsoft, that's already been done by Microsoft themselves. What you do have to do to avoid being sad about Microsoft is stick your head in the sand.
Telling it to listen only on the lo/127.0.0.1 interface seems to do that quite nicely. The "-nolisten tcp" option to X shuts down TCP listening completely (your apps then connect to X through a Unix socket), if you prefer that.
Try searching for "Windows". Low signal to noise? Not half!
Xnest :1 -geometry 1024x768 -query localhost
Presuming that Xnest is included in your X installation and you are running a display manager (kdm, gdm or xdm for example), this will open a 1024x768 window and display a login prompt within it. You can then log in (either as the same user or as a completely different user) and use a web browser on a 1024x768 screen even though your screen is 2560x2048.
My sister-in-law uses this to see what the pages in her forthcoming web site would look like to someone browsing at that res. Her comment on 640x480 was "What is this? A thumbnail?" (-:
In short, why bother being merely as good as MS-Windows? As well as doing everything that it does, we should take note of useful things which are easy for us and impossible for the convicted monopolist.
With Xnest, as well as opening a session at a different resolution, you can also open one at a different depth. If the hardware supports it, it will be done directly otherwise it will be emulated. You can see how horrid you app looks in 16 colours, greyscale or black-and-white. If the Xnest session is larger than your physical screen, you can scroll around and see it all in chunks as big as your hardware allows.
If you want to put an MS-Windows session on your screen rdesktop 1.3 or later does full RDPv5 protocol, all depths and resolutions (plus sound, if you don't mind kissing your bandwidth farewell). If you want a copy of someone else's screen, use x2x. If you want to display stuff at a resolution or depth which you don't have, or in batch without toucing your video hardware, use Xv - take 4096x4096 screenshots on your S3-Virge-equipped machine, knock yourself out. Or use Xvnc and display to a VNC client only. And so on. I'm waiting for Xrdp to appear. (-:
Yup! I agree 100% with every syllable and sentiment in the parent message. (-:
"CNBClover"? (-:
(This is a forward-looking statement, so I might be lying to you). Educate enough sharetraders and the stock'll either nosedive or the fraudulent manipulation will become so obvious that the appropriate authorities will be embarrassed into shutting them down, with prejudice.
...this year, anyway. (-:
Leave it up for the good of society at large: don't base your decision on how many losers leech and profit, base it on how many sysadmins who are too flat-out to blink (let alone figure out how to send you money) have had their lives bettered by your efforts.
After the flood, no raindrop wants to admin responsibility.
My sentiments, too, although I would have at least left the pieces up on a server somewhere.
I have all kinds of bizarre little projects of my own kicking around, and I try to never obselete them; every so often (maybe 3 or 4 times a year) someone emails me to say "thanks for that great little utility" and I have to mail back and say "which one?" because the thing is so trivial and long-forgotten that I have a snowflake's chance in Sudan of guessing right. It's not as if one download a week is going to be expensive.
Ending support is fine, but I think throwing a hissy fit is a bit over the top. Others will think differently.
Yes, otherwise it's an offer of trade, not a gift.
Not so sure about this one. I find error reports more useful but if few to none are also saying thanks then I'm probably missing the mark somewhere.
True, except that he's under no obligation to continue providing the source if he ceases providing the binaries, and being the original (and apparently sole) author, he has every right to change the licence arrangements. What he has no right to do is to reach back out and demand that people stop using his source if he ever open-sourced it.
Also, you have no right to demand that he be happy or generous, only reasonable and not rude. And "reasonable" most definitely does not mean "agreeable".
The long and the short of this is that if you find a copy of his code with a FOSS licence, by all means go ahead and use it according to the terms of the licence, set up a community, make it world-famous, knock yourself out - but he has no obligation to support it or you at all.
...a southern-hemisphere smiley when you see one? (-:
...but lends point to the old saying "never do anything that you wouldn't be caught dead doing". (-:
That's just because I'm loud and insistent, not because I'm smart or industrious. (-:
...that I know of, and I'd be helpless if it did because I'm pretty busy already.
I did get a couple of new enquiries from potential recruits, which is far more valuable to me. Linux is blossoming in Oz (at last!) and I have more work than people to do it. If I can get more people onto the coalface, I'll have time for stuff like this posting, family time, writing software I want to write rather than stuff I need to write to solve an immediate problem. And I'll be able to provide service to more of the Perth IT community, which badly needs it.
SCO ANZ didn't make this particular standover play until the 19th, at which point I was on a Qantas 737-400 over the Nullarbor somewhere, out of contact with Linus and next port of call at least 2000km from Adelaide.
But yes, Linus did say that on the previous Friday, and not just to me, to a bunch of people standing outside Elder Hall discussing the OCG miniconf's outcome. No press release, Linus is like that.
Three cacheable images per typical page, minimal scripting, no worries. But the link was totally trashed, which was sad for the other people using it. I've put a box up on a home DSL line and pointed the DNS at it for a few days.
It's still gold-on-black because I got sick of black-on-white. (-:
Actually, if you look closely, the original background is not exactly black. It's a very dark image of Tux overlaid on a CPU core.
Knights might lose
but another will stand
till SCO folds