The asset purchase agreement in a much more readable form than the scrambled PDF on SCO's site:at Groklaw
I don't think I've seen attachment E before, but it appears to be a list of documentation, not software. I wonder if SCO thinks that owning the documentation for the ABI gives them ownership of the ABI itself?
I think the ESA is on the right track - there's no point in spending money duplicating other people's technology. Spend it doing something useful and different. SMART is an example of this.
True wrt. CVS, but it's not nearly as haphazard as you make it sound.
Patches typically go first to Linux Kernel or a related list (often many iterations of patches), then Linus picks them up and includes them in a release, along with a changelog indicating what was included and where it came from.
Also, the files themselves have copyright information from the various authers who've made a significant contribution.
The process was never foolproof - some people sent patches direct to Linus, but only people he knew and trusted would ever be able to get a patch in that way. Also, changelogs were of varying quality. But I can't imagine how an uncommented anonymous patch would ever get in.
(Sorry for replying so long after the post - hope you check your replies.)
In fact the commentary I've read (clearly I'm not a biblical scholar) talks about the New Testament, but....
I have to wonder what lead to these rules being put into effect. Generally you only make these sort of stringent laws in response to a problem. In this case the problem was probably "loose transcription" by earlier scribes.
Before the New Testament became the New Testament, it existed as a whole set of diverse stories shared by different Christian groups. The stories used by different groups were generally similar, but also varied quite a bit. While the stories were about sacred things, the stories themselves weren't necessarily considered sacred. Of course, once the book was formalized and people started to worry about what version was "correct" then things got a lot stricter.
Don't know about the Old Testament - I guess it's too long ago to have a clear history - but I would imagine it's similar.
An interesting conjecture, but you'd have to provide some sort of evidence to back it up. The "famous" bible codes are clearly nonsense - you can tweak the algorithm to extract just about anything from any text (see here for an example). Do you have some alternative code that stands up better to scrutiny?
Also, at the time the books in the bible were written, accurate transcription wasn't considered nearly as important as it is today. The stories were part of an oral tradition anyway, and would have evolved in the telling before ever being committed to paper. Early scribes were aware of this and would not have thought twice about "correcting" parts of the story that didn't, to them, seem to be right.
This whole issue never bothered me (a Canadian), but I've met several Mexicans abroad who were really offended by the term "American" being used to describe U.S. Citizens. I don't think it's common to use the term "American" in Canada, although I can't remember for sure. I've only started using it in my own speech since leaving Canada.
Also, in Finland the common adjective for U.S. Citizens is USAlainen (as opposed to "Americalainen").
Like I said, I don't really care myself, but clearly there are a fair number of people disagree with the common U.S. usage.
Re:You know... things just don't amaze me.
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Message in a Battle
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That's an interesting point.
It reminds me of my reaction to the footage of the planes crashing into the World Trade Center. Honestly, I thought it looked like bad B-Movie special-effects. The real-life footage just didn't look like what I would have imagined the scene to look like.
Once you get so far beyond every day experience, you can't trust yourself to know what looks real and what doesn't.
1. Dunno how easy it is to immigrate. I believe there's a points system, and if you've got a degree and speak English or French you should do Ok.
2. Canada allows and supports dual citizenship, but be careful. I think you still have to file U.S. tax returns and abide by some wierd U.S. laws even if you leave the country (the U.S. tries to restrict where you go and who you do business with - they can get you if you ever decide to return to the U.S. for a visit). It might be easier to renounce your U.S. citizenship.
3. Tech market sucked badly when I left three years ago - it follows more or less the same pattern as the U.S.
The information available about the IBM contract is pretty clear, unless you accept SCO's redefinition of the word 'derived'. I really don't think they'll get away with this.
The reason regular people don't need to be worried, however, is that even if IBM were to somehow lose, that doesn't effect Linux. It's a contract dispute between IBM and SCO. If there were really copyright issues involved SCO would have produced the evidence by now.
I've read the Cringely article, and it's certainly true that MS can do this for a while, but they have to keep some of those going in order to have a long-term business plan.
At some point over the next ten years or so Office and Windows will stop making significant profits (or at least, they'll only make normal ~10% margin). When that happens the share price has to drop, as it's predicated on high margin and high growth.
Of course Balmer and Gates realize this. That's why they've started to prepare shareholders for a different kind of Microsoft. They've started issuing dividends - a sure sign of a stock that's going from high-growth to steady but boring profit. That's part 1 of the plan, and very sensible on their part. Part 2 is harder: make sure the steady but boring profit comes through.
I don't think it's ever happened before that a company with more money than God sees it's main revenue source evaporate. It will be interesting to see how it plays out. Can they build up the non-Office, non-Windows part of their business fast enough to avoid imploding?
I'm pretty sure there's no such thing as the "University of Finland". At least, I've been living in Finland for the past two years and I've never heard of it.
If you feel that government should represent the interests of the people, and you feel that SuSe is a good thing for the people of Germany, then this situation makes perfect sense. It's only a conflict if the interests of SuSe don't align with the interests of German citizens (which I'm sure is a case that MS would want to make).
You could, however, say that it's anti free-market. I would reply "so what?", since I think the government needs to intervene in the market from time to time to correct problems.
It's a matter of opinion I guess. I stopped carrying my Palm after about six months. I didn't like having both a PDA and a phone hanging from my belt. For me, the more things they can cram into a cell-phone-sized package the better.
Also, just making the phone smaller is useless at this point. To have any real effect you'd have to shrink the screen and keyboard to an annoyingly small size. Better to keep a reasonable form factor and just put more things in the case.
As for using the PDA while you're talking, the hands-free earpiece is what you need. Also good for freaking people out in the supermarket as you appear to talk to an invisible person.
I have to admit I hated the blank media tax when it was introduced, but...
Over time it's come to sound like a sensible solution to a difficult problem. Note that the tax isn't $5 (or whatever you think it might take to compensate the label fully for the lost sale), it's much less. I assume the rate is calculated to take into account the fact that a lot of media isn't used for music.
Anyway, I'm not arguing it's the perfect solution, but it sounds like one of the least evil ways to address the problem. A typically Canadian compromise.
There are forks even today, but they're small because there are advantages to staying reasonably close to the 'standard'. Those reasons aren't going to go away just because there are more people using it.
If you stay close to the standard Linus kernel and LSB user space, you benefit from the collective efforts of the rest of the contributors. The more you diverge, the more trouble you'll have integrating the latest wiz-bang feature developed elsewhere.
Unix forked because there was no significant development happening on the main AT&T trunk. All the cool stuff was happening on the vendor branches, and little of it made it back to AT&T. You had to fort to be competitive, and there were no new features drawing you back to the trunk.
If the recipients didn't agree to the mail filter then that's a different story. I wasn't aware that ISPs did that, and I certainly wouldn't condone it.
As for the inconvenience of the phone call, it honestly doesn't matter. I filter my mail because without the filter I wouldn't be able to use e-mail at all and you'd still have to make the phone call. In fact, I was harder to reach before the filter because I'd delete a lot of legitimate messages by mistake. I think the collateral damage now is actually much lower.
Who cares about you? You dance around his valid complaints and concerns and beat your own drum.
Presumably the people who are being blocked by my spam filter care about me. The question is whether or not I care enough about them to turn off the filter. Up until now the answer is 'no'. I'd rather have usable e-mail that blocks a few legitimate mails than e-mail that's totally unusable. That's the trade off I've made.
Similarly, if people whom you would like to do reach by e-mail aren't accepting your mail, take it up with them. They need to make an informed decision. If they only get a moderate amount of spam then they might well decide that you're worth a bit of annoyance. If the amount of spam they would normally receive is overwhelming, they'll probably tell you to get lost.
This is something the recipients of your mail have decided to subscribe to. They've weighed the downside: no mail from you, against up side: less mail from spammers, and decided it's worth it.
There's no point getting indignant about it. Just contact the person you're trying to mail by phone. Maybe if they know they're blocking you they'll re-evaluate.
Personally, there are very few people for whom I'd be willing to spend an hour a day deleting spam. Unless you're a really important client, you'd be out of luck with me.
My understanding is that IBM's Linux distribution policy is specfically crafted to make sure IBM doesn't lose the right to enforce it's patents, at least not on code they don't explicitly release.
Specifically, IBM doesn't actually distribute Linux, it partners with Suse and RedHat who do that for them. Sure they produce patches, but that's all you'll get from them, not the whole kernel.
So IBM has decided to give up the right to enforce the patent on, for example, RCU. They distributed the RCU patches as GPL. But if, for example, RedHat contributes some code to the kernel that contains IBM patented techniques, IBM can still enforce those patents because it never distributes non-IBM code.
But their claims are far broader than copyright, and seem to stem from a questionable interpretation of the word "derived".
You might be able to build a case that SCO had no reason to know about the alleged copyright infringement, but clearly SCO new about and even participated in incorporating "enterprise class" features into Linux. Not only wasn't it a secret, it was widely publicised by IBM.
Now, looking a the contracts as shown on SCO's web site, you might be possible to interpret them SCO's way (well, I don't really think so, but let's pretend for the sake of argument). There's no way you could conclude, however, that SCO didn't know that IBM was porting JFS or RCU to Linux. SCO knew it, and continued to distribute Linux anyway as part of their business.
Nope, the code isn't derived from a GPL work. The GPL work might be said to derive partially from your work.
Unless you explicitly do otherwise, you retain the copyright to your work, and you can do whatever you want with it. If you include it in a GPL work then you can't restrict what other people can do to the code, but that doesn't affect your rights.
What happens five years down the line? Don't know. I would imagine that as long as you have some evidence of what really happened you're fine.
In practice I don't think this has ever happened. Most people are very reasonable and don't particularly want to go to court, so you just explain what happened and that's the end of it. Note that you would normally have your name somewhere in the GPLd work, and that would lend credibility to what you're claiming.
Slashdot Mirror
The asset purchase agreement in a much more readable form than the scrambled PDF on SCO's site:at Groklaw
I don't think I've seen attachment E before, but it appears to be a list of documentation, not software. I wonder if SCO thinks that owning the documentation for the ABI gives them ownership of the ABI itself?
I think the ESA is on the right track - there's no point in spending money duplicating other people's technology. Spend it doing something useful and different. SMART is an example of this.
True wrt. CVS, but it's not nearly as haphazard as you make it sound.
Patches typically go first to Linux Kernel or a related list (often many iterations of patches), then Linus picks them up and includes them in a release, along with a changelog indicating what was included and where it came from.
Also, the files themselves have copyright information from the various authers who've made a significant contribution.
The process was never foolproof - some people sent patches direct to Linus, but only people he knew and trusted would ever be able to get a patch in that way. Also, changelogs were of varying quality. But I can't imagine how an uncommented anonymous patch would ever get in.
(Sorry for replying so long after the post - hope you check your replies.)
In fact the commentary I've read (clearly I'm not a biblical scholar) talks about the New Testament, but....
I have to wonder what lead to these rules being put into effect. Generally you only make these sort of stringent laws in response to a problem. In this case the problem was probably "loose transcription" by earlier scribes.
Before the New Testament became the New Testament, it existed as a whole set of diverse stories shared by different Christian groups. The stories used by different groups were generally similar, but also varied quite a bit. While the stories were about sacred things, the stories themselves weren't necessarily considered sacred. Of course, once the book was formalized and people started to worry about what version was "correct" then things got a lot stricter.
Don't know about the Old Testament - I guess it's too long ago to have a clear history - but I would imagine it's similar.
An interesting conjecture, but you'd have to provide some sort of evidence to back it up. The "famous" bible codes are clearly nonsense - you can tweak the algorithm to extract just about anything from any text (see here for an example). Do you have some alternative code that stands up better to scrutiny?
Also, at the time the books in the bible were written, accurate transcription wasn't considered nearly as important as it is today. The stories were part of an oral tradition anyway, and would have evolved in the telling before ever being committed to paper. Early scribes were aware of this and would not have thought twice about "correcting" parts of the story that didn't, to them, seem to be right.
This whole issue never bothered me (a Canadian), but I've met several Mexicans abroad who were really offended by the term "American" being used to describe U.S. Citizens. I don't think it's common to use the term "American" in Canada, although I can't remember for sure. I've only started using it in my own speech since leaving Canada.
Also, in Finland the common adjective for U.S. Citizens is USAlainen (as opposed to "Americalainen").
Like I said, I don't really care myself, but clearly there are a fair number of people disagree with the common U.S. usage.
That's an interesting point.
It reminds me of my reaction to the footage of the planes crashing into the World Trade Center. Honestly, I thought it looked like bad B-Movie special-effects. The real-life footage just didn't look like what I would have imagined the scene to look like.
Once you get so far beyond every day experience, you can't trust yourself to know what looks real and what doesn't.
Found this neat little calculator to tell you if you have enough points: self-assessment test.
1. Dunno how easy it is to immigrate. I believe there's a points system, and if you've got a degree and speak English or French you should do Ok.
2. Canada allows and supports dual citizenship, but be careful. I think you still have to file U.S. tax returns and abide by some wierd U.S. laws even if you leave the country (the U.S. tries to restrict where you go and who you do business with - they can get you if you ever decide to return to the U.S. for a visit). It might be easier to renounce your U.S. citizenship.
3. Tech market sucked badly when I left three years ago - it follows more or less the same pattern as the U.S.
The information available about the IBM contract is pretty clear, unless you accept SCO's redefinition of the word 'derived'. I really don't think they'll get away with this.
The reason regular people don't need to be worried, however, is that even if IBM were to somehow lose, that doesn't effect Linux. It's a contract dispute between IBM and SCO. If there were really copyright issues involved SCO would have produced the evidence by now.
I've read the Cringely article, and it's certainly true that MS can do this for a while, but they have to keep some of those going in order to have a long-term business plan.
At some point over the next ten years or so Office and Windows will stop making significant profits (or at least, they'll only make normal ~10% margin). When that happens the share price has to drop, as it's predicated on high margin and high growth.
Of course Balmer and Gates realize this. That's why they've started to prepare shareholders for a different kind of Microsoft. They've started issuing dividends - a sure sign of a stock that's going from high-growth to steady but boring profit. That's part 1 of the plan, and very sensible on their part. Part 2 is harder: make sure the steady but boring profit comes through.
I don't think it's ever happened before that a company with more money than God sees it's main revenue source evaporate. It will be interesting to see how it plays out. Can they build up the non-Office, non-Windows part of their business fast enough to avoid imploding?
Hmm. Implying that all the universities in Finland participated? That seems pretty unlikely.
In fact Finland does have many universities. A great many when you consider it only has about 5 million people.
I'm pretty sure there's no such thing as the "University of Finland". At least, I've been living in Finland for the past two years and I've never heard of it.
If you feel that government should represent the interests of the people, and you feel that SuSe is a good thing for the people of Germany, then this situation makes perfect sense. It's only a conflict if the interests of SuSe don't align with the interests of German citizens (which I'm sure is a case that MS would want to make).
You could, however, say that it's anti free-market. I would reply "so what?", since I think the government needs to intervene in the market from time to time to correct problems.
It's a matter of opinion I guess. I stopped carrying my Palm after about six months. I didn't like having both a PDA and a phone hanging from my belt. For me, the more things they can cram into a cell-phone-sized package the better.
Also, just making the phone smaller is useless at this point. To have any real effect you'd have to shrink the screen and keyboard to an annoyingly small size. Better to keep a reasonable form factor and just put more things in the case.
As for using the PDA while you're talking, the hands-free earpiece is what you need. Also good for freaking people out in the supermarket as you appear to talk to an invisible person.
Well, they could to lots of things, but there's no conceivable reason for them to do it.
The assumption underlying your question is that the Chinese government does things just to be nasty.
I have to admit I hated the blank media tax when it was introduced, but...
Over time it's come to sound like a sensible solution to a difficult problem. Note that the tax isn't $5 (or whatever you think it might take to compensate the label fully for the lost sale), it's much less. I assume the rate is calculated to take into account the fact that a lot of media isn't used for music.
Anyway, I'm not arguing it's the perfect solution, but it sounds like one of the least evil ways to address the problem. A typically Canadian compromise.
There are forks even today, but they're small because there are advantages to staying reasonably close to the 'standard'. Those reasons aren't going to go away just because there are more people using it.
If you stay close to the standard Linus kernel and LSB user space, you benefit from the collective efforts of the rest of the contributors. The more you diverge, the more trouble you'll have integrating the latest wiz-bang feature developed elsewhere.
Unix forked because there was no significant development happening on the main AT&T trunk. All the cool stuff was happening on the vendor branches, and little of it made it back to AT&T. You had to fort to be competitive, and there were no new features drawing you back to the trunk.
If the recipients didn't agree to the mail filter then that's a different story. I wasn't aware that ISPs did that, and I certainly wouldn't condone it.
As for the inconvenience of the phone call, it honestly doesn't matter. I filter my mail because without the filter I wouldn't be able to use e-mail at all and you'd still have to make the phone call. In fact, I was harder to reach before the filter because I'd delete a lot of legitimate messages by mistake. I think the collateral damage now is actually much lower.
Presumably the people who are being blocked by my spam filter care about me. The question is whether or not I care enough about them to turn off the filter. Up until now the answer is 'no'. I'd rather have usable e-mail that blocks a few legitimate mails than e-mail that's totally unusable. That's the trade off I've made.
Similarly, if people whom you would like to do reach by e-mail aren't accepting your mail, take it up with them. They need to make an informed decision. If they only get a moderate amount of spam then they might well decide that you're worth a bit of annoyance. If the amount of spam they would normally receive is overwhelming, they'll probably tell you to get lost.
This is something the recipients of your mail have decided to subscribe to. They've weighed the downside: no mail from you, against up side: less mail from spammers, and decided it's worth it.
There's no point getting indignant about it. Just contact the person you're trying to mail by phone. Maybe if they know they're blocking you they'll re-evaluate.
Personally, there are very few people for whom I'd be willing to spend an hour a day deleting spam. Unless you're a really important client, you'd be out of luck with me.
Bruce Perens pointed out over at lwn.net that Caldera put this particular code under a BSD license in 2000.
My understanding is that IBM's Linux distribution policy is specfically crafted to make sure IBM doesn't lose the right to enforce it's patents, at least not on code they don't explicitly release.
Specifically, IBM doesn't actually distribute Linux, it partners with Suse and RedHat who do that for them. Sure they produce patches, but that's all you'll get from them, not the whole kernel.
So IBM has decided to give up the right to enforce the patent on, for example, RCU. They distributed the RCU patches as GPL. But if, for example, RedHat contributes some code to the kernel that contains IBM patented techniques, IBM can still enforce those patents because it never distributes non-IBM code.
But their claims are far broader than copyright, and seem to stem from a questionable interpretation of the word "derived".
You might be able to build a case that SCO had no reason to know about the alleged copyright infringement, but clearly SCO new about and even participated in incorporating "enterprise class" features into Linux. Not only wasn't it a secret, it was widely publicised by IBM.
Now, looking a the contracts as shown on SCO's web site, you might be possible to interpret them SCO's way (well, I don't really think so, but let's pretend for the sake of argument). There's no way you could conclude, however, that SCO didn't know that IBM was porting JFS or RCU to Linux. SCO knew it, and continued to distribute Linux anyway as part of their business.
Nope, the code isn't derived from a GPL work. The GPL work might be said to derive partially from your work.
Unless you explicitly do otherwise, you retain the copyright to your work, and you can do whatever you want with it. If you include it in a GPL work then you can't restrict what other people can do to the code, but that doesn't affect your rights.
What happens five years down the line? Don't know. I would imagine that as long as you have some evidence of what really happened you're fine.
In practice I don't think this has ever happened. Most people are very reasonable and don't particularly want to go to court, so you just explain what happened and that's the end of it. Note that you would normally have your name somewhere in the GPLd work, and that would lend credibility to what you're claiming.