Not only that, but even if they wouldn't take the 'refund that portion of the license dodge' (and if they wouldn't, why do they write it in?) then they're STILL only offering to do what the law always has required.
End users of a product who reasonably believe they have a valid license for it are never on the hook if it turns out their supplier was infringing someone else. Never. The supplier is the one at fault, and they have to pay, not their customers.
If you buy a book, and it turns out to have been plagiarised, does that make you liable? Of course not! The author of the book is the one on the hook, not you.
If you bought DOS 6, which infringed on Stac, were you on the hook when Stac went to court and proved that fact? Absolutely not. MS was. They paid. DOS 6 owners paid nothing, were under no threat, and continued to use it as if nothing had happened.
SCO is trying to make up the law as they go along, and they know it, that's why they're fighting in the press while maneuvering to stay out of an actual courtroom as long as possible. And selling off their stocks on the sly. I'd be surprised if they aren't all buying homes somewhere without an extradition treaty as well at the moment.
It does have a topic, Caldera. This is Caldera we're talking about here, they just bought the name of SCO recently.
Unfortunately the editors don't always use it.
I'm glad to see these articles, I think this raft of $%&* is very important and I want to keep up on it. But I do wish they'd file these stories altogether in that topic so those of you that don't want to see it can just turn it off instead of posting incessant whines about it.
Of course, since most of you don't seem to realise this is Caldera, it might not do much good.
Personally, I'd like to see SCO get bought out by the Linux community, who then votes to oust the CEOs without a golden parachute.
At least until you can do it for less than a penny a share, that would be a horribly stupid waste of money. They have liabilities out the ass, and no real assets. Their stock price is absurdly high. If we bought them out we'd just be making them rich and ourselves poor.
While some things run very fast on wine, some things run dog slow.
That's true, but some things also run much faster on WINE than on actual windows systems. It's really not emulation, 'dictionary sense' or any other sense. It's translation. Totally different concept.
Re:Dean for President
on
Saving the Net
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· Score: 5, Insightful
The most ironic thing about campaign finance reform being pushed by the Democrats is that they were hurt the most by it.
That's not actually true.
The class hurt most by it is non-incumbents. Incumbents get free postage and lots of opportunities to effectively campaign from their official position and get plenty of free media coverage. Incumbents have little difficulty raising enough money to wage an effective campaign, both because they have the advantages mentioned above and so need less money, and also because donors know incumbents are likely to win and thus are better bets.
It's challengers of any party, particularly from third parties of course, that this 'reform' hurts. It forces them to spend even more time and effort raising money, instead of campaigning, and it makes it even harder for them to raise enough money to make a viable campaign effort, particularly in the face of the advantages incumbents hold by default.
The 'reform' is a fraud, whose primary effect is to make both Democratic and Republican incumbents even more safe from challengers, particularly from smaller parties like the Libertarians and the Greens.
Nothing wrong with either one of them--it's just a case of each side acting to reduce the risk from a potential adverse outcome. In any case, nothing to get real angry about here--if you're sure SCO's case is a crock, then get on with your life and don't buy the license.
Ok it's pretty ludicrous to think they ever might win this sort of case, against the users that is. But hey, if you want to hedge your bets, I've got a much cheaper way for you to do it. SCO will give you, today, all the code in the linux kernel which they claim title to, at the low cost of $0.00, subject only to the terms of the GNU GPL. Just click this link. It's been months since they claimed to have discovered violations of their IP in this, so there's no way they can claim they were duped and it was hidden from them. So just download it and store it someplace safe. If they ever bother you, you have an airtight license and there's nothing they can do.
This link is not slashdotted yet, what's the problem? I'm getting 40KB/S here!
I guess no one believes SCO after all. Anyone that's thinking about paying their extortion money 'just in case' come on and download the source directly from them, under GPL, and set your mind at ease much more cheaply!
Seriously. If they try to sue you, even if they had a case before they wouldn't anymore once you pointed out that you had received it directly from them, under GPL, long after they supposedly 'discovered' the violations of their IP.
Well the solution depends on your needs, of course. I think 'groupware' is really overkill in most instances, but since you're obviously looking for something like that...
Novell Groupwise is a definate contender here. The one downside seems to be that the server end doesn't yet run on *nix (unless I'm misinterpreting?) although that's been planned for awhile. But if you have one Novell or Windows server that can run it, it's pretty client-agnostic, there's a (quite good, I am told) web-based interface as well as clients for Linux, Mac, and Windows.
Bynari Insight is another strong contender, it's what IBM is putting on their linux servers these days and those that have used it seem to really like it.
As I understand it, someone correct me if I'm wrong, what Evolution brings is a little different - the ability to connect to Exchange and Lotus Notes servers, right? So that would be a third possibility, but from what I've read it looks like Insight and Groupware are better systems, unless perhaps you've already invested in Exchange or Notes...
VNC is a very poor substitute.
on
Qt On DirectFB
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· Score: 1
Try running three different programs on three different machines and displaying them together on one screen with VNC.
Well first let me just say that I've known some damn sharp secretaries, and you shouldn't disparage the lot like that.
But anyway, no, GNU and BSD aren't systems that the average secretary is going to want to set up and figure out. But neither is WindowsXP. You're really implying a false comparison it seems to me, between setting up a Free system or sitting down and working on a proprietary system that an Admin of some sort has already set up for her.
The better comparison would be between both systems, already properly set up by a competent admin (ok, I know in corporate america that's sometimes asking too much but bear with me.) In that case I don't think there is any problem with the Free systems.
What do secretaries typically use a computer for? Number one, a glorified typewriter. With OpenOffice that's covered quite well. There are plenty of more options, ranging the scale from the truly lightweight text editors to truly professional quality DTP, so regardless of her needs it's almost certainly covered one way or another.
Number two, email. Obviously not a problem.
Number three, scheduling. Plenty of good solutions there too.
Number 4, portals to the real computers in the backoffice. This may be a terminal interface of one kind or another (yes, that's actually very common for secretarial staff, many do most of their work in a terminal to a Unix box or mainframe somewhere else.) Terminal emulators are not a problem. The newer interfaces tend to be web-based, again not a problem at all, you can take your pick from the best web browsers available, Opera, Mozilla and spawn, or Konq.
A competent admin, whether she's running Windows or *nix, is going to set up her machine to do those things, make sure that the means to launch the programs she needs are obvious and accessible, and try to lock down everything else as much as possible to minimise the time he has to spend cleaning things up. Windows is actually at a *disadvantage* here, it's insecure by design and you simply can't make it reasonably secure without interfering with Suzies usage and becoming hated for being such a hardass. Whereas with *nix it's actually very easy to do.
So yes, I think that Free Software IS ready for the secretaries of the world, without any doubt.
Re:I can't believe people mod this up
on
Qt On DirectFB
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· Score: 1
Why do you say that?
I'm the one saying that young people can be great coders, maybe you confused me with one of the bitter old ACs flaming me for it?;)
I have to stop development on one of my projects because I don't want to pay SCO any money to use Linux. And why should I? Linux is supposed to be free.
Why in the hell would you stop development? That's just silly.
You don't have to pay SCO any money to use linux. They're trying to shake folks down, they don't have a leg to stand on. You can read the license, and even if their case were not total bs, even if it turned out their allegations were true, you don't have any legal liability from using Linux under the license you have, until and unless SCO can get a court to say otherwise.
This is no different than if I were to announce that Windows XP was actually mine, and start sending out letters to everyone I could find running it demanding that they buy a license for it from me. The appropriate response would be to laugh and chuck my letter in the trash.
Even if I later proved that XP really was my code, MS would be liable, not the users I sent those letters to. They were using it with what they reasonably thought to be a valid license from the copyright holder. They would have no need to buy a license from me until after a court decided in my favour. And probably not even then, if historical cases (such as the suits back and forth between Stac and MS) are considered.
The whole 'buy a license from linux from us' thing is just a scam. Don't give them money, and don't quit using linux, just laugh at them and go on.
And somebody please fill me in, but is the SCO hotshot lawyer who lost the Gore case against Florida and worked against Microsoft such a hotshot? It seems to me that he's more of a loser.
Indeed, his high fees certainly don't seem to be justified by his record, do they?
Re:Sounds like a plan.
on
Qt On DirectFB
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· Score: 2, Interesting
People making claims that the UNIX SOCKETS for local display don't involve overhead haven't made their evidence available.
I don't think anyone has claimed that at all.
Of course there is overhead involved in that abstraction, but there is overhead plenty of places. With modern hardware it's trivial. You can run X on a 486 just fine, and if the overhead isn't too much there then why would you worry about it on a newer 'puter?
Lots of people complain about X in ignorance, because what they're complaining about, when you look at it, isn't X at all. It's bloated crap they insist on running on X. It's libraries compiled with silly options. It's Xfree86, in some cases, which is simply one implementation of X, and has some weak spots. People, innocently, then generalise that because one poorly configured or designed system that happens to use X runs poorly for them, that something must be wrong with X itself, but that does not follow.
If you throw that same bloated software on a FB, it's going to be just as slow and bloated. If you compile your libraries with debug symbols on and use them on FB, it's going to be just as much a ridiculous memory hog as it was on X. If you don't use (or don't have) a good accellerated driver for your video card, changing from X to a FB isn't going to fix the problem.
FB makes sense for embedded applications where you really don't have room for X. But on a regular workstation, you have more than adequate resources to run it and run it well. If it's not running well, the problem is not X itself, and changing from X to a less sophisticated, capable, and mature system isn't going to address the real problem, except possibly by sheer accident.
Re:I can't believe people mod this up
on
Qt On DirectFB
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· Score: 3, Insightful
I don't care how motivated or energetic you were as a teen -- you just didn't have the experience to write really good code. If you can't see the difference, you still haven't got it.
That's almost complete nonsense, but not quite. It's true, people that age usually aren't capable of doing an entire project well. They need someone with more experience to see the whole picture and sort the wheat from the chaff, to serve as something like an Editor - like Linus does for instance. But young people are perfectly capable of writing damn good code, and if you can't see that then it's you that doesn't have it - it being objectivity.
Absolutely true -- I'm running X on a 25MHz 486SX with 8MB of RAM, and X is very responsive.
Wow nice job.
I first ran X on a 386, 25Mhz I think? It was from before they started making SXs. I wouldn't call the thing responsive, but hell nothing outside DOS/Console mode was... it worked well enough.
The 486 I was referring to in my post was a clock tripled 33DX (DX100 they called it, but it wasn't, a real DX100 is a clock doubled 50 and boy are those hard to find - not many were made because not many MBs back then could really handle the 50Mhz bus) with 16 megs of ram. It ran quite well, but for your setup I imagine you must be a little more stripped down... fluxbox?
There's no reason GNUStep on a 2 ghz PIII should run slower than NextStep on a 25mhz 68030.
No, there isn't. If you've really had this experience you have something horribly misconfigured and/or miscompiled, or you're running a ton of other bloat or something...
Every time I hear someone make this complaint that I've been able to physically go take a look at their system, I've found the bugginess and the bloat all right, but it's not in X.
It's in using miscompiled libraries, buggy bloated WMs, and the like.
You can run X on a 486 with decent performance, if you don't &*(% the thing up and saddle it with a bunch of useless crap.
Do you want a horny teenager writing your production Apache server??
Abso-freakin-lutely. I remember when I was a horny teenager dammit! Lots of energy, sharp mind, just the sort of person you need hacking code.
Plus, if he's off hacking my server, that means I have a window to hit on his hot horny teenager girlfriend. %^}
Re:Before all the flamers get in.
on
Qt On DirectFB
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· Score: 1
From a GUI perspective, if you use all KDE apps, for instance, things have a very nice consistent feel to it. Same with gnome. When you start mixing things, plus mixing in old X apps, you just detract from an overall experience..
Umm here's an idea for you then... don't mix them! No one's forcing you to.
Instead you want to advocate a system where those of us that disagree can't mix them? Why is that?
Anyway, as you should realise but apparently don't, it won't work, because you can't force us to use it.
And you're completely off-topic anyway, this isn't about 'desktop' machines or workstations, it's about being able to build GUIs for embedded applications where you don't actually have the horsepower to run X.
X is a really great system. Not perfect, but no system is. It's a shame you don't appreciate it, but if you want something else, feel free to build it and use it.
It's only $10 or $15 million rather than the $150 million the market is valuing them at now, but they've got some assets, mostly cash.
Yeah, that's true, but that's what they're going to be eating up as they drag this case out. So if you don't pop em early, there won't be much left to pull damages out of.
Of course, like you, I think it's very likely that there is a lot of insider trading going on here, and the principles rather than the company are planning to abscond with a lot of cash. But tracking that down and proving it after the fact could be very difficult.
You're using WINE, and what does that stand for? You can say it boys and girls, WINE Is Not an Emulator.
Seriously. No emulation involved. Just a quick translation. Something like BSDs Linux compat layer, not at all like an actual emulation. Running windows in vmware in linux is emulation, but WINE just remaps and does a quick translation. That's why it's so much faster. Also why not everything works with it, and why it doesn't work on non x86 hardware of course.
I've often found WINE runs applications (not all but some) noticeably faster than native windows will on the same hardware. No emulator would ever be able to do that.
Well I suppose that's going to be the crux of the case, if and when this ever gets to court. It looks like SCO is going to claim it is, and that they own everything every Unix vendor has ever made. IBM has a little different reading of the contract.
Either way, frankly, their linux licensing crap is not just a joke, it's flat out illegal. Even if SCO were somehow to miraculously turn out to have a case against IBM, that doesn't translate into owning Linux. Every 'binary only runtime license' they sell is another case of copyright infringement, of 'software piracy' as it's usually phrased. Even if IBM violated their contract with SCO, that wouldn't give SCO a license to violate their contract with the Linux hackers and others whose work they've been, and still to this day are, distributing. At worst, they'd have to tell the kernel people what lines, exactly, IBM contributed improperly and then they'd work around it and fix the problem.
Now this is where SCOs claims go beyond just bizaare and improbable to downright twilight zone. They appear to also be claiming that linux itself, not just the parts that IBM allegedly contributed improperly, belongs to SCO too! That an independent work-alike, written from scratch to conform to publically known specifications by people with no contractual obligations to SCO whatsoever, is STILL a derivative work!
Their arrogance knows no bounds. Let's hope their ability to bribe judges is more modest. That's the only way such a bizaare theory could ever be upheld in a court of law.
I still don't believe they intend to ever see this to trial though. Their actions just aren't consistent with such a brazen plan. I think they know they haven't a case, against IBM or anyone else, but they hope if they make enough of a stink they can dump their stock for overinflated prices before everyone figures out what they're up to.
Slashdot Mirror
Not only that, but even if they wouldn't take the 'refund that portion of the license dodge' (and if they wouldn't, why do they write it in?) then they're STILL only offering to do what the law always has required.
End users of a product who reasonably believe they have a valid license for it are never on the hook if it turns out their supplier was infringing someone else. Never. The supplier is the one at fault, and they have to pay, not their customers.
If you buy a book, and it turns out to have been plagiarised, does that make you liable? Of course not! The author of the book is the one on the hook, not you.
If you bought DOS 6, which infringed on Stac, were you on the hook when Stac went to court and proved that fact? Absolutely not. MS was. They paid. DOS 6 owners paid nothing, were under no threat, and continued to use it as if nothing had happened.
SCO is trying to make up the law as they go along, and they know it, that's why they're fighting in the press while maneuvering to stay out of an actual courtroom as long as possible. And selling off their stocks on the sly. I'd be surprised if they aren't all buying homes somewhere without an extradition treaty as well at the moment.
Actually the earliest was the Gospel of Mark, which was probably written about 80. Not completely in it's modern form at that point, but mostly there.
The rest of the Gospels, however, definately are later. Matthew comes next, about 100. Luke and John are probably 120-130.
Yes, the genuine Pauline corpus dates to 50-60. But they don't bear much relation to the Gospel stories.
It does have a topic, Caldera. This is Caldera we're talking about here, they just bought the name of SCO recently.
Unfortunately the editors don't always use it.
I'm glad to see these articles, I think this raft of $%&* is very important and I want to keep up on it. But I do wish they'd file these stories altogether in that topic so those of you that don't want to see it can just turn it off instead of posting incessant whines about it.
Of course, since most of you don't seem to realise this is Caldera, it might not do much good.
At least until you can do it for less than a penny a share, that would be a horribly stupid waste of money. They have liabilities out the ass, and no real assets. Their stock price is absurdly high. If we bought them out we'd just be making them rich and ourselves poor.
That's true, but some things also run much faster on WINE than on actual windows systems. It's really not emulation, 'dictionary sense' or any other sense. It's translation. Totally different concept.
That's not actually true.
The class hurt most by it is non-incumbents. Incumbents get free postage and lots of opportunities to effectively campaign from their official position and get plenty of free media coverage. Incumbents have little difficulty raising enough money to wage an effective campaign, both because they have the advantages mentioned above and so need less money, and also because donors know incumbents are likely to win and thus are better bets.
It's challengers of any party, particularly from third parties of course, that this 'reform' hurts. It forces them to spend even more time and effort raising money, instead of campaigning, and it makes it even harder for them to raise enough money to make a viable campaign effort, particularly in the face of the advantages incumbents hold by default.
The 'reform' is a fraud, whose primary effect is to make both Democratic and Republican incumbents even more safe from challengers, particularly from smaller parties like the Libertarians and the Greens.
Ok it's pretty ludicrous to think they ever might win this sort of case, against the users that is. But hey, if you want to hedge your bets, I've got a much cheaper way for you to do it. SCO will give you, today, all the code in the linux kernel which they claim title to, at the low cost of $0.00, subject only to the terms of the GNU GPL. Just click this link. It's been months since they claimed to have discovered violations of their IP in this, so there's no way they can claim they were duped and it was hidden from them. So just download it and store it someplace safe. If they ever bother you, you have an airtight license and there's nothing they can do.
This link is not slashdotted yet, what's the problem? I'm getting 40KB/S here!
I guess no one believes SCO after all. Anyone that's thinking about paying their extortion money 'just in case' come on and download the source directly from them, under GPL, and set your mind at ease much more cheaply!
Seriously. If they try to sue you, even if they had a case before they wouldn't anymore once you pointed out that you had received it directly from them, under GPL, long after they supposedly 'discovered' the violations of their IP.
Well the solution depends on your needs, of course. I think 'groupware' is really overkill in most instances, but since you're obviously looking for something like that...
Novell Groupwise is a definate contender here. The one downside seems to be that the server end doesn't yet run on *nix (unless I'm misinterpreting?) although that's been planned for awhile. But if you have one Novell or Windows server that can run it, it's pretty client-agnostic, there's a (quite good, I am told) web-based interface as well as clients for Linux, Mac, and Windows.
Bynari Insight is another strong contender, it's what IBM is putting on their linux servers these days and those that have used it seem to really like it.
As I understand it, someone correct me if I'm wrong, what Evolution brings is a little different - the ability to connect to Exchange and Lotus Notes servers, right? So that would be a third possibility, but from what I've read it looks like Insight and Groupware are better systems, unless perhaps you've already invested in Exchange or Notes...
Try running three different programs on three different machines and displaying them together on one screen with VNC.
If Linux stole NUMA and SMP from SCO, that would be a mighty good trick, considering Linux had it first.
Well first let me just say that I've known some damn sharp secretaries, and you shouldn't disparage the lot like that.
But anyway, no, GNU and BSD aren't systems that the average secretary is going to want to set up and figure out. But neither is WindowsXP. You're really implying a false comparison it seems to me, between setting up a Free system or sitting down and working on a proprietary system that an Admin of some sort has already set up for her.
The better comparison would be between both systems, already properly set up by a competent admin (ok, I know in corporate america that's sometimes asking too much but bear with me.) In that case I don't think there is any problem with the Free systems.
What do secretaries typically use a computer for? Number one, a glorified typewriter. With OpenOffice that's covered quite well. There are plenty of more options, ranging the scale from the truly lightweight text editors to truly professional quality DTP, so regardless of her needs it's almost certainly covered one way or another.
Number two, email. Obviously not a problem.
Number three, scheduling. Plenty of good solutions there too.
Number 4, portals to the real computers in the backoffice. This may be a terminal interface of one kind or another (yes, that's actually very common for secretarial staff, many do most of their work in a terminal to a Unix box or mainframe somewhere else.) Terminal emulators are not a problem. The newer interfaces tend to be web-based, again not a problem at all, you can take your pick from the best web browsers available, Opera, Mozilla and spawn, or Konq.
A competent admin, whether she's running Windows or *nix, is going to set up her machine to do those things, make sure that the means to launch the programs she needs are obvious and accessible, and try to lock down everything else as much as possible to minimise the time he has to spend cleaning things up. Windows is actually at a *disadvantage* here, it's insecure by design and you simply can't make it reasonably secure without interfering with Suzies usage and becoming hated for being such a hardass. Whereas with *nix it's actually very easy to do.
So yes, I think that Free Software IS ready for the secretaries of the world, without any doubt.
Why do you say that?
I'm the one saying that young people can be great coders, maybe you confused me with one of the bitter old ACs flaming me for it? ;)
Why in the hell would you stop development? That's just silly.
You don't have to pay SCO any money to use linux. They're trying to shake folks down, they don't have a leg to stand on. You can read the license, and even if their case were not total bs, even if it turned out their allegations were true, you don't have any legal liability from using Linux under the license you have, until and unless SCO can get a court to say otherwise.
This is no different than if I were to announce that Windows XP was actually mine, and start sending out letters to everyone I could find running it demanding that they buy a license for it from me. The appropriate response would be to laugh and chuck my letter in the trash.
Even if I later proved that XP really was my code, MS would be liable, not the users I sent those letters to. They were using it with what they reasonably thought to be a valid license from the copyright holder. They would have no need to buy a license from me until after a court decided in my favour. And probably not even then, if historical cases (such as the suits back and forth between Stac and MS) are considered.
The whole 'buy a license from linux from us' thing is just a scam. Don't give them money, and don't quit using linux, just laugh at them and go on.
Indeed, his high fees certainly don't seem to be justified by his record, do they?
I don't think anyone has claimed that at all.
Of course there is overhead involved in that abstraction, but there is overhead plenty of places. With modern hardware it's trivial. You can run X on a 486 just fine, and if the overhead isn't too much there then why would you worry about it on a newer 'puter?
Lots of people complain about X in ignorance, because what they're complaining about, when you look at it, isn't X at all. It's bloated crap they insist on running on X. It's libraries compiled with silly options. It's Xfree86, in some cases, which is simply one implementation of X, and has some weak spots. People, innocently, then generalise that because one poorly configured or designed system that happens to use X runs poorly for them, that something must be wrong with X itself, but that does not follow.
If you throw that same bloated software on a FB, it's going to be just as slow and bloated. If you compile your libraries with debug symbols on and use them on FB, it's going to be just as much a ridiculous memory hog as it was on X. If you don't use (or don't have) a good accellerated driver for your video card, changing from X to a FB isn't going to fix the problem.
FB makes sense for embedded applications where you really don't have room for X. But on a regular workstation, you have more than adequate resources to run it and run it well. If it's not running well, the problem is not X itself, and changing from X to a less sophisticated, capable, and mature system isn't going to address the real problem, except possibly by sheer accident.
That's almost complete nonsense, but not quite. It's true, people that age usually aren't capable of doing an entire project well. They need someone with more experience to see the whole picture and sort the wheat from the chaff, to serve as something like an Editor - like Linus does for instance. But young people are perfectly capable of writing damn good code, and if you can't see that then it's you that doesn't have it - it being objectivity.
Wow nice job.
I first ran X on a 386, 25Mhz I think? It was from before they started making SXs. I wouldn't call the thing responsive, but hell nothing outside DOS/Console mode was... it worked well enough.
The 486 I was referring to in my post was a clock tripled 33DX (DX100 they called it, but it wasn't, a real DX100 is a clock doubled 50 and boy are those hard to find - not many were made because not many MBs back then could really handle the 50Mhz bus) with 16 megs of ram. It ran quite well, but for your setup I imagine you must be a little more stripped down... fluxbox?
No, there isn't. If you've really had this experience you have something horribly misconfigured and/or miscompiled, or you're running a ton of other bloat or something...
Oh bloody nonsense.
Every time I hear someone make this complaint that I've been able to physically go take a look at their system, I've found the bugginess and the bloat all right, but it's not in X.
It's in using miscompiled libraries, buggy bloated WMs, and the like.
You can run X on a 486 with decent performance, if you don't &*(% the thing up and saddle it with a bunch of useless crap.
Abso-freakin-lutely. I remember when I was a horny teenager dammit! Lots of energy, sharp mind, just the sort of person you need hacking code.
Plus, if he's off hacking my server, that means I have a window to hit on his hot horny teenager girlfriend. %^}
Umm here's an idea for you then... don't mix them! No one's forcing you to.
Instead you want to advocate a system where those of us that disagree can't mix them? Why is that?
Anyway, as you should realise but apparently don't, it won't work, because you can't force us to use it.
And you're completely off-topic anyway, this isn't about 'desktop' machines or workstations, it's about being able to build GUIs for embedded applications where you don't actually have the horsepower to run X.
X is a really great system. Not perfect, but no system is. It's a shame you don't appreciate it, but if you want something else, feel free to build it and use it.
Yeah, that's true, but that's what they're going to be eating up as they drag this case out. So if you don't pop em early, there won't be much left to pull damages out of.
Of course, like you, I think it's very likely that there is a lot of insider trading going on here, and the principles rather than the company are planning to abscond with a lot of cash. But tracking that down and proving it after the fact could be very difficult.
Umm actually no it's not.
You're using WINE, and what does that stand for? You can say it boys and girls, WINE Is Not an Emulator.
Seriously. No emulation involved. Just a quick translation. Something like BSDs Linux compat layer, not at all like an actual emulation. Running windows in vmware in linux is emulation, but WINE just remaps and does a quick translation. That's why it's so much faster. Also why not everything works with it, and why it doesn't work on non x86 hardware of course.
I've often found WINE runs applications (not all but some) noticeably faster than native windows will on the same hardware. No emulator would ever be able to do that.
Hmm... I'm trying to see a downside here. ;)
Well I suppose that's going to be the crux of the case, if and when this ever gets to court. It looks like SCO is going to claim it is, and that they own everything every Unix vendor has ever made. IBM has a little different reading of the contract.
Either way, frankly, their linux licensing crap is not just a joke, it's flat out illegal. Even if SCO were somehow to miraculously turn out to have a case against IBM, that doesn't translate into owning Linux. Every 'binary only runtime license' they sell is another case of copyright infringement, of 'software piracy' as it's usually phrased. Even if IBM violated their contract with SCO, that wouldn't give SCO a license to violate their contract with the Linux hackers and others whose work they've been, and still to this day are, distributing. At worst, they'd have to tell the kernel people what lines, exactly, IBM contributed improperly and then they'd work around it and fix the problem.
Now this is where SCOs claims go beyond just bizaare and improbable to downright twilight zone. They appear to also be claiming that linux itself, not just the parts that IBM allegedly contributed improperly, belongs to SCO too! That an independent work-alike, written from scratch to conform to publically known specifications by people with no contractual obligations to SCO whatsoever, is STILL a derivative work!
Their arrogance knows no bounds. Let's hope their ability to bribe judges is more modest. That's the only way such a bizaare theory could ever be upheld in a court of law.
I still don't believe they intend to ever see this to trial though. Their actions just aren't consistent with such a brazen plan. I think they know they haven't a case, against IBM or anyone else, but they hope if they make enough of a stink they can dump their stock for overinflated prices before everyone figures out what they're up to.