You might want to check up on your history. Parts of the patent system may be a couple of centuries old, but software patents aren't in that class. Until 1980 the Patent Office didn't allow software patents at all until it was forced to do so by the Supreme Court. Even that wasn't really a "software patent" in the sense that Amazon's one-click patent is; it was just a computer program that was part of a larger invention. Unfortunately this bone-headed decision has blurred the long-established principle that ideas can't be patented. Since computer code is basically just the instantiation of an idea, software patents make ideas patentable. That has led to further deterioration by allowing things like business methods to be patented. So now you even have these clowns claiming that story plot lines can be patented.
The "200 year old" system he's bragging about worked fine. It's the recent introduction of changes to that system which have caused the problems.
I think this point is often unfairly ignored: the existence of DRM is a fantastic chance for new distribution to reveal new bands. Unfortunately this music is difficult to find because there is simply so much of it.
This sounds to me like a fantastic opportunity for someone, partly because there is so much music and partly because so much of it is dreck. It seems to me that the need here is for a site that takes in all kinds of music, but sorts it based on a rec system not unlike Slashdot's. What you need is a reliable ranking system to pick out the most popular tracks and an aging system so that -- even if a track is still popular -- users can ask to see only the newer tracks so they won't keep looking over the same set of tracks all the time. Note that I said "tracks", not "bands". Some bands only produce one decent track in their entire existence.
Off the top of my head, I can't see that this would be a completely free site, but it should be pretty cheap. There would have to be an agreement that the band's music would only be available from the one site (or else the site would just be used to rate the tracks and everyone would download elsewhere). Perhaps the site could develop it's ratings from volunteers who agreed to listen to and rate a certain number of new tracks in exchange for free downloads. I can see three possible sources of income:
The bands, who are already paying for hosting their music somewhere -- and that's just to give it away for free. Better to give the money to someone who offers a chance at return on the investment.
The users, who are currently either digging through masses of music to find the tracks they like or paying a buck a track. I suspect that five or ten cents a track would be closer to the mark, with the band getting a cut of each download. It's also possible for the site to have a section where users can cook up their own CDs and receive them by mail, complete with cover art. Of course that would be more expensive than the downloads, but it beats the heck out of paying ten bucks for a CD with one decent track.
Ads. Of course a successful site like this would generate a ton of traffic.
In the end it comes down to whether or not people will be willing to pay the musicians a fair price for their product. The only service the industry is providing at the moment is sorting through all the bad musicians and picking a few of the good musicians (out of many) who can produce decent music. ("Decent music" is here defined as the kind of music people will pay for.) For this service, they are charging the consumers a horrific amount of money while doling out a pathetic amount to those who are actually making the product. If we want to take our business elsewhere, someone needs to make a profitable alternative.
Using rabbits as a meat source is hardly new and this breed isn't unusual. A 23 pound rabbit is certainly hefty, but it's not a record breaker. The Flemish Giant has been documented up to 26 pounds and it's one of the oldest breeds around. Rabbits can survive on grass and thrive if a little grain and vegetables are added to their diets. That makes them a logical choice for countries with limited foodstuffs. The most interesting thing about the article was the writer couldn't seem to get past how the breeder "manages to stay emotionally detached enough to send the furry, innocent-looking, huge-eared creatures to slaughter." When's the last time you saw a farmboy get emotially attached to the meat stock?
If these guys want big bunnies, they should just show up at the next Topsfield Fair.
According to Yahoo it closed yesterday at $1.24 and spent the day bouncing around between $1.15 and $1.25, finally closing the day $1.17. That's down seven cents. It's a pretty volatile stock, but the trend has definitely been down as the case wound its way through the courts.
Wall Street still amazingly thinks the stock has some value.
This is not exactly true. I haven't seen a "buy" recommendation on this stock in a long time. I think that the reason for the current valuation lies in three things. First of all, there are the day-traders. They like volatile stock because they believe they can time their buying and selling to take advantage of the price swings. If you check that Yahoo link you'll see 39,626 shares changed hands today, compared to the average of 171,160 over the past three months. To me that says that most of the trading is done by day traders trying to outguess the market. If they judged it right today -- buying at $1.15 and selling at $1.25 -- they would have made ten cents a share (minus fees). Of course, they could just as easily have been wrong and lost ten cents a share (and still have to pay the fees).
Then there are the current shareholders or, as they are called on the financial boards, the bagholders. They bought the stock before anybody notice the emperor was naked. The big players are in an awkward position. If they start to sell their large holdings in bulk it will create a run on the market as everyone tries to get out. They might as well hold on to them as not. Maybe a miracle will bail them out as they eye each other nervously hoping nobody else makes the first move.
Then there are the short sellers. These happy souls borrowed some shares and sold them off with a promise to buy them back later and return them. Short-selling can be risky because the stock might skyrocket and leave you stuck with a huge bill. Or there might be a "short squeeze" when a bunch of short sellers are forced to redeem their shares at whatever the current market rate might be, causing an artificial spike in price. But neither of these two occurrences have happened with SCO so they're just grinning and cheering for a bankruptcy. In which case they never have to pay back that loan. SCO is currently the most heavily shorted stock on the market.
Why wasn't Novell doing all of this monitoring and watching in the first place? And why didn't they realize they were getting scammed sooner?
Believe it or not, I don't think Novell knew. The original press releases read like something you'd expect from the Three Stooges. First Novell accepted SCO's version and assumed they had sold the copyrights. Then they said they said they didn't sell the copyrights. Then SCO found a piece of paper in their files that Novell couldn't find in their version and sent it to Novell. Novell read the paper and agreed that it looked like they had sold the copyrights. Then Novell's lawyers looked at the paper and said that they didn't. Eventually, somebody dug up the minutes of a meeting for the Board of Directors from something like a decade ago and decided they definitely did not sell the copyrights.
Keep in mind that nobody was much interested in UNIX by this point. The original deal was between the original Santa Cruz Operation and Novell because Novell wanted out of the UNIX biz while Santa Cruz wanted some stuff so they could do a joint project with IBM. That project didn't pan out, so they renamed themselves Tarentella and sold the UNIX business to Caldera. Novell didn't much care who owned the business as long as they got their checks, which both Santa Cruz and Caldera sent them as per the contract.
Caldera didn't want the UNIX business either. They were a Linux business and thought they could convert SCO's UNIX distribution network to selling Linux instead. That didn't work out either; apparently the UNIX resellers didn't want to switch to Linux and Caldera was making more selling UNIX than distributing Linux. So they ditched Linux (and their CEO) and switched to concentrating on UNIX and changed their name to SCO for the name recognition.
But there was no scam -- at least with the UNIX royalties -- until the whole Linux shakedown started. Santa Cruz and Caldera sent Novell the checks and Novell pocketed the money. The Linux shakedown was just supposed to get IBM to buy them out, in which case it would have stayed business as usual. Things didn't hit the fan until after SCO tried to up the ante by threatening to sue Linux users over UNIX rights. And even then it took a while.
I'd have loved to have been in the Novell staff meeting when someone (I've always pictured a balding accountant with a slight paunch) looked up from his notes and said, "Hey, isn't SCO supposed to be giving most of the UNIX money to us?"
"SCOSource" was SCO's shakedown plan where Linux users would buy an intellectual property license to pay SCO for the UNIX code which IBM (and others) "improperly" put into Linux. It never really went anywhere, but SCO was trying to posture for the media and pretend it was a raging success. Microsoft and Sun gave SCO money, ostensibly as UNIX licensing fees, but more likely to encourage the lawsuit and damage Linux. SCO put those fees in their books as SCOSource profits to create the illusion that the scam was paying off. But Novell's contract with SCO required SCO to give Novell 95% of any UNIX royalties. So, since SCOSource is a UNIX license, they must owe Novell 95% of the take, right? If you're following Groklaw, it shows up in Novell's Amended Counterclaims.
Since the counterclaims have been filed, SCO has been backpedaling like mad. They've claimed that these weren't really SCOSource fees, they were just licensed through the SCOSource division. And they weren't really about SVRX, they were about UnixWare and the SVRX was "incidental". I'd love to see the actual contracts, but SCO, Sun and Microsoft are all pleading that the documents are confidential.
I probably would too if I got involved in a mess like this.
Or that "someone" could (again) buy millions worth of precious SCO software licenses to keep things afloat.
The whole point of the article is that the "millions" that Sun and Microsoft paid for "precious SCO software licenses" are likely to end up -- in large part -- in Novell's pocket. If they did it again I'm sure Novell would demand the court impound the money immediately before SCO got a chance to fritter it away again. Kimball might throw in a contempt of court charge to top it off, since they're repeating the same misdeeds already being heard in his courtroom.
Novell and SCO signed a countract where "certain rights" to UNIX (specifically System V, Release X - SVRX for short) were transferred to SCO.
In exchange, SCO would give the royalties for SVRX (minus a 5% handling fee) to Novell.
Novell claims that the "rights" transferred to SCO do not include the copyrights and that Novell still owns those copyrights. SCO claims that the contract does transfer the copyrights.
SCO is suing IBM claiming that IBM's contributions to Linux infringe SCO's copyrights in UNIX.
Since suing IBM for infringing SCO's copyrights doesn't make any sense if SCO doesn't even own those copyrights, SCO had to sue Novell as well for "slander of title" (i.e., claiming you own something you don't).
Microsoft and Sun gave SCO a ton of cash, theoretically for UNIX licenses, but those with a suspicious turn of mind think it was to fund the anti-Linux lawsuit.
What's happened now is that Novell has gone to the court and said that, no matter who owns the copyrights, SCO owes us 95% of the SVRX royalties. But SCO didn't give us 95% of the money that Sun and Microsoft gave them. Worse still, SCO is spending money like water on the IBM suit. They're asking the court to set up a "constructive trust" to prevent SCO from spending any more of Novell's money. SCO is trying to tell the court that those deals weren't "really" SVRX licenses but something else. Unfortunately the documents available to the public have been so heavily editted that there's no way to tell what the Sun and Microsoft agreements actually say.
It's kind of an end run around the basic issue (who owns the copyrights) but -- if the court finds in Novell's favor -- it will effectively bankrupt SCO and (possibly) bring this ridiculous lawsuit mercifully to an end. For those of us with with suspicious minds, it also has the feel of poetic justice in that the money Microsoft and Sun spent to kill Linux winds up going to a Linux distributor (Novell owns SUSE) to defend a major Linux contributor (IBM).
Judge Kimball has ruled that the Novell case should go before the IBM case, so the Novell timeline is now more important than that of IBM. While it's SCO that sued Novell, the whole show (including IBM) is likely to be shut down by Novell's counterclaims. Boiled down, Novell's has nine "claims for relief" and, if granted, there is nothing left for SCO to sue about. You can read them yourself in the PDF, but the basics are:
Novell owns the copyrights and not SCO.
SCO needs to give Novell a full accounting of unreported money it owes Novell for SVRX licenses.
Novell wants to court to order SCO to comply with their contract, which gives all the royalties from SVRX to Novell.
Novell has the right to waive SCO's claims on UNIX code. Including those against IBM.
Novell wants the court to issue a "declaratory judgment" that Novell has the right to audit SCO's performance to make sure that it doesn't take any more of Novell's money.
SCO needs to put all the money it "converted" (i.e., "stole") from those licenses into a constructive trust. (This is the one they're fussing about now. Sun and Microsoft gave SCO a bucket of cash to carry on the lawsuit against Linux under cover of a UNIX license. But SCO is supposed to give UNIX license money to Novell.)
Number seven repeats number six and asks for the trust again. Eh, lawyers. Go figure.
Number eight asks for the trust again, but adds punitive damages for swiping the money in the first place. Since SCO has already spent most of the cash, this is pretty much just adding insult to injury.
Finally, Novell wants a complete accounting of all SVRX agreements or "other agreements relating to royalty bearing products." That's because SCO was claiming that the Sun and Microsoft agreements weren't "real" SVRX agreements, so SCO didn't owe Novell any money. Novell wants an accounting to make sure SCO isn't hiding any more ill-gotten gains.
So, yeah, the cash is a big deal and it's going to bankrupt SCO. Couldn't happen to a more deserving bunch of fellas. But read number four again. If Novell has it's way, the IBM case is gone too because SCO never had the right to sue in the first place.
Of course, there are always IBM's counterclaims, but it's unlikely there will be anything left after Novell is done.
Europeans are not yet as dependent on their cars so they actually need to watch TV in it.
I was a bit baffled by this one myself. I know of nobody who watches "television" in their cars; just video. When we go to visit my mom (a fourteen hour drive) we aren't going to ask the five-year-old to play with his toy cars in a car seat the whole time. We pop in a Thomas the Tank Engine video into the DVD player and he's happy.
And, of course, the DVD players are digital already. Which, I suppose, is the whole point. The analog audience has been dwindling for years, so it's not digital per se that's the problem. It's all the boneheaded stuff (DRM, DMCA, et tedious cetera) that's been getting glued on during the transition.
IBM & Novell have both been saying: No, you go first.
Actually, Novell hasn't expressed an opinion on this. It's SCO who has been saying IBM should go first. Novell can't help them in the IBM case, but it could hurt them badly. If the judge finds that SCO owns all (or some) of the UNIX copyrights, it still doesn't prove IBM misused them. But if he finds that SCO doesn't even own the copyrights, even the most brain-dead jury on the planet couldn't be bamboozled into taking SCO's side. The last thing SCO wants to do is to walk into court against the Nazgul with a finding on record that SCO didn't even own what they claim was stolen. Unfortunately for them it looks like that's exactly what is going to happen.
Meanwhile, Red Hat's lawyers haven't renewed their objections to letting IBM go first. It looks like they're perfectly happy to let the Nazgul do all the heavy lifting. By the time the smoke clears on IBM and Novell, Red Hat's team will have a slam dunk.
American companies General Electric, IBM, Microsoft and Hewlett-Packard have joined with the New York Law School and the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) to inaugarate a new system of peer review for software patents.
When the judiciary started allowing patents on software (along with business processes and who knows what else) it was a sweet deal for the big players. They apply for a ton of expensive patents that the little players can't afford. If they need to use a patent they don't have, they just agree for a patent swap. And they can still crush any little player who tries to get in the game.
Then along come the patent trolls. These people don't have any viable products to defend, so they aren't interested in swapping patents. They just want cash. Its an unforseen consequence of the new rules that the big players don't like.
But now they have a hand in screening new patents. Consider:
The one-year pilot program will begin in early 2007 and focus on published but not-yet-granted patent applications relating to computer software.
Note that the huge pile of dubious patents already granted aren't up for review. Adding another layer of review will probably slow down matters for big companies as well, but everything already granted is getting a free ride.
I'd like them to tell me and let me make my own decisions. Unfortunately, Microsoft is into full-on "all your base" mode now and they assume that they have the right to make everyone else's decisions for them. Either they allow all sorts of malware with no thought of protection, or they go for the draconion Microsoft-controlled option. There is no middle ground.
A reasonable compromise would be to allow different modes for experts and novices.
SpamHaus is subject to the jurisdiction of a U.S. court. Once a court (any court, not just American) decides that you're subject to its jurisdiction, it can issue an order compelling you to do whatever it wants. It can also issue a court order compelling a 3rd party (in this case, the domain registrar) to take some action in regards to you.
The second half of this statement is correct, the first half is not. Just because the court decided they had jurisdiction doesn't mean that it's so. The court should not have accepted e360's contention that Spamhaus does business in Illinois without e360 providing some evidence. IANAL, but it sounds to me like Spamhaus withdrew from the case because they didn't want to have to prove each case in court or they'd get deluged in cases from every little one-man spam shop. They really need a finding that they are not under the jurisdiction of local courts.
This problem is chronic as the courts try to figure out how old laws apply to the internet. It applies to pornography, which the courts have held should apply "local standards". What does that mean when a picture posted in Japan shows up in Kansas? Can New York collect taxes from someone who never enters New York just because his computer is dialed into a company located there?
A lot of our laws are based on "where" something happens, so what do they mean when "where" doesn't matter?
This sounds like a business oppotunity for a law firm. Agree to represent Spamhaus pro bono if you get to keep 75% of the take (minus the expenses). Then turn around and file a counter suit against the spammers on Spamhaus' behalf, contending that they really are spammers in violation of US law. Since there is gobs of evidence that these really are spammers, the case should be a slam-dunk.
It turns out that Forbes.com was wrong... In an article written by Daniel Lyons?
Technically, it wasn't Forbes making a claim; it was SCO. I noticed that neither Groklaw nor Slashdot linked to the original article. If they had, it can be seen that Lyons refers to the SCO suit as "ever more desperate--and ever more weird." He also asked IBM for their side of the story but they -- true to form -- declined to comment. Gone are the insults and gratuitous references to "Linux zealots" which graced earlier articles. Also significant is that he actually wrote to PJ pointing out that he was reporting SCO's claims, not supporting them. He's obviously beome a great deal more sensitive about Groklaw's influence on the community following the case.
The story here isn't that SCO has come up with another lame excuse in another vain attempt to flog the dead horse of their court case back to life, but that even their most ardent supporters are starting to see what's going on.
Essentially, the claims of copyright infringment in Linux based on UNIX source code just got thrown out of court.... SCO withdrew all of their allegations of copyright infringement in one of their early amended complaints.
It would be more accurate to say that SCO tried to withdraw all their allegations of copyright infringement. SCO has been flip-flopping on the issue; talking copyright when it suited them, but then saying that it was purely a contract case when they were pressed. But the judge ruled that the case clearly hinged on copyrights no matter how SCO tried to spin things. SCO still tries to avoid the copyright issue, but if the judge wants to hear about copyrights, there's not much they can do.
At a minimum, IBM's sixth counterclaim is for breach of the GPL, which is based on copyright law.
SCO made 294 claims. IBM objected to 198 of the claims. Judge Wells allowed 17 of IBM's 198 disputed claims and barred the rest.
IBM's motion was pretty simple. The court ordered SCO to produce source code and SCO didn't do that. What's left is the stuff where source code was provided or wasn't necessary and it's pretty weak stuff.
Three of the claims IBM objected to were "negative know how". SCO argued that these were cases where IBM figured out how to contribute something to Linux because they saw how UNIX got it wrong. In other words, that IBM infringed SCO's intellectual property by not using SCO's source code. Wells expressed doubt about the argument -- calling it a "tenuous position" -- but accepted that there was good reason for not providing the source code.
The rest of the claims she allowed really weren't about coding at all. They were claims that IBM employees who worked on Dynix were contractually prohibited from working on Linux. Again, she wasn't ruling on the merits but agreed that this was a case where source code wouldn't be expected.
Finally, there are the items IBM didn't object to; the ones where SCO actually provided source code references. IBM has already said that it's planning to deal with these with a request for summary judgement.
Also on the chopping block, there's another motion on the table by IBM to scrap most of SCO's expert witnesses. It seems SCO was trying to use those witnesses to add a bunch more code to their "final" list of allegedly infringing material. It remains to be seen how much of that survives.
In a nutshell, it doesn't look like enough of SCO's case will survive long enough to make it to trial.
Excuse me? How do you figure? At this very moment, my butt is parked in an Michigan office with a tie around my neck doing work I could do at home in my bunny slippers. I've got an office all set up there and a high speed line to work with. Now assuming a $100 per hour billing rate, the client is shelling out about $4000 a week for my services. They're also shelling out about $1900 a week to fly me out from Boston, drive around in a rental car and sleep in a hotel.
Are you saying big business wants to pay a 50% premium on consulting services?
If they are only targetting PC makers that have agreed to only sell PCs with their OS on them, then they have a legal, though morally questionable, right to do this.
Umm. No, they don't.
IIRC, Microsoft used to make contracts where vendors who agreed to go "Microsoft only" would get special considerations (price breaks, joint marketing, et cetera). But, as part of the antitrust deal, they are not allowed to do this anymore. They can give breaks on volume, but not breaks for explicitly cutting out competitors. It's not so much that they don't have a legal right to enforce such contracts; they don't have a legal right to even have such contracts.
My first "real" computer was a Kaypro 16/2; a DOS 2.1 luggable in a suitcase-like steel box. That would have been the early eighties.
But my first computer (circa 1965) was a mechanical plastic job with springs and rods that only had three "bits" to work with. Each bit was a plastic tab which slid back and forth so that either a zero or one would display in the window. Programming was done with plastic straws that blocked movement of the rods. You could input data by sliding the numbered tabs manually. You ran one "cycle" by pushing in and pulling out another tab. It came with a few simple programs, including one game (Nim).
Start with a vehicle that burns the biodiesel. Capture the emmisions into some substrate(s) to sequester the CO, CO2, and NOX.
I think that capturing the escaping carbon and shipping it off for processing is where the plan's going to break down. It may be technically feasible, but it's going to be expensive because it means hauling the captured carbon around with you, shipping it off and then processing it. All those extra steps are going to cost money and energy. You'd be better off using a car with a primarily electrical energy system. Since an electrical plant is stationary, it won't be necessary to transport the captured carbon. And "shipping" electricity is relatively cheap.
The plug-in hybrid is essentially an electric car with one important difference. When it runs out of electricity, a motor kicks in to recharge the battery. Optimally, it can run all day on electricity alone, but you're not stranded if you need to travel farther than the car's all-electric range. And if the car's recharging motor ran off biodiesel, so much the better.
I don't think we're ever going to get to zero-emissions, but we should be able to do a damn sight better than we're doing now.
Slashdot Mirror
The "200 year old" system he's bragging about worked fine. It's the recent introduction of changes to that system which have caused the problems.
Off the top of my head, I can't see that this would be a completely free site, but it should be pretty cheap. There would have to be an agreement that the band's music would only be available from the one site (or else the site would just be used to rate the tracks and everyone would download elsewhere). Perhaps the site could develop it's ratings from volunteers who agreed to listen to and rate a certain number of new tracks in exchange for free downloads. I can see three possible sources of income:
- The bands, who are already paying for hosting their music somewhere -- and that's just to give it away for free. Better to give the money to someone who offers a chance at return on the investment.
- The users, who are currently either digging through masses of music to find the tracks they like or paying a buck a track. I suspect that five or ten cents a track would be closer to the mark, with the band getting a cut of each download. It's also possible for the site to have a section where users can cook up their own CDs and receive them by mail, complete with cover art. Of course that would be more expensive than the downloads, but it beats the heck out of paying ten bucks for a CD with one decent track.
- Ads. Of course a successful site like this would generate a ton of traffic.
In the end it comes down to whether or not people will be willing to pay the musicians a fair price for their product. The only service the industry is providing at the moment is sorting through all the bad musicians and picking a few of the good musicians (out of many) who can produce decent music. ("Decent music" is here defined as the kind of music people will pay for.) For this service, they are charging the consumers a horrific amount of money while doling out a pathetic amount to those who are actually making the product. If we want to take our business elsewhere, someone needs to make a profitable alternative.Using rabbits as a meat source is hardly new and this breed isn't unusual. A 23 pound rabbit is certainly hefty, but it's not a record breaker. The Flemish Giant has been documented up to 26 pounds and it's one of the oldest breeds around. Rabbits can survive on grass and thrive if a little grain and vegetables are added to their diets. That makes them a logical choice for countries with limited foodstuffs. The most interesting thing about the article was the writer couldn't seem to get past how the breeder "manages to stay emotionally detached enough to send the furry, innocent-looking, huge-eared creatures to slaughter." When's the last time you saw a farmboy get emotially attached to the meat stock?
If these guys want big bunnies, they should just show up at the next Topsfield Fair.
Then there are the current shareholders or, as they are called on the financial boards, the bagholders. They bought the stock before anybody notice the emperor was naked. The big players are in an awkward position. If they start to sell their large holdings in bulk it will create a run on the market as everyone tries to get out. They might as well hold on to them as not. Maybe a miracle will bail them out as they eye each other nervously hoping nobody else makes the first move.
Then there are the short sellers. These happy souls borrowed some shares and sold them off with a promise to buy them back later and return them. Short-selling can be risky because the stock might skyrocket and leave you stuck with a huge bill. Or there might be a "short squeeze" when a bunch of short sellers are forced to redeem their shares at whatever the current market rate might be, causing an artificial spike in price. But neither of these two occurrences have happened with SCO so they're just grinning and cheering for a bankruptcy. In which case they never have to pay back that loan. SCO is currently the most heavily shorted stock on the market.
Keep in mind that nobody was much interested in UNIX by this point. The original deal was between the original Santa Cruz Operation and Novell because Novell wanted out of the UNIX biz while Santa Cruz wanted some stuff so they could do a joint project with IBM. That project didn't pan out, so they renamed themselves Tarentella and sold the UNIX business to Caldera. Novell didn't much care who owned the business as long as they got their checks, which both Santa Cruz and Caldera sent them as per the contract.
Caldera didn't want the UNIX business either. They were a Linux business and thought they could convert SCO's UNIX distribution network to selling Linux instead. That didn't work out either; apparently the UNIX resellers didn't want to switch to Linux and Caldera was making more selling UNIX than distributing Linux. So they ditched Linux (and their CEO) and switched to concentrating on UNIX and changed their name to SCO for the name recognition.
But there was no scam -- at least with the UNIX royalties -- until the whole Linux shakedown started. Santa Cruz and Caldera sent Novell the checks and Novell pocketed the money. The Linux shakedown was just supposed to get IBM to buy them out, in which case it would have stayed business as usual. Things didn't hit the fan until after SCO tried to up the ante by threatening to sue Linux users over UNIX rights. And even then it took a while.
I'd have loved to have been in the Novell staff meeting when someone (I've always pictured a balding accountant with a slight paunch) looked up from his notes and said, "Hey, isn't SCO supposed to be giving most of the UNIX money to us?"
Since the counterclaims have been filed, SCO has been backpedaling like mad. They've claimed that these weren't really SCOSource fees, they were just licensed through the SCOSource division. And they weren't really about SVRX, they were about UnixWare and the SVRX was "incidental". I'd love to see the actual contracts, but SCO, Sun and Microsoft are all pleading that the documents are confidential.
I probably would too if I got involved in a mess like this.
- Novell and SCO signed a countract where "certain rights" to UNIX (specifically System V, Release X - SVRX for short) were transferred to SCO.
- In exchange, SCO would give the royalties for SVRX (minus a 5% handling fee) to Novell.
- Novell claims that the "rights" transferred to SCO do not include the copyrights and that Novell still owns those copyrights. SCO claims that the contract does transfer the copyrights.
- SCO is suing IBM claiming that IBM's contributions to Linux infringe SCO's copyrights in UNIX.
- Since suing IBM for infringing SCO's copyrights doesn't make any sense if SCO doesn't even own those copyrights, SCO had to sue Novell as well for "slander of title" (i.e., claiming you own something you don't).
- Microsoft and Sun gave SCO a ton of cash, theoretically for UNIX licenses, but those with a suspicious turn of mind think it was to fund the anti-Linux lawsuit.
What's happened now is that Novell has gone to the court and said that, no matter who owns the copyrights, SCO owes us 95% of the SVRX royalties. But SCO didn't give us 95% of the money that Sun and Microsoft gave them. Worse still, SCO is spending money like water on the IBM suit. They're asking the court to set up a "constructive trust" to prevent SCO from spending any more of Novell's money. SCO is trying to tell the court that those deals weren't "really" SVRX licenses but something else. Unfortunately the documents available to the public have been so heavily editted that there's no way to tell what the Sun and Microsoft agreements actually say.It's kind of an end run around the basic issue (who owns the copyrights) but -- if the court finds in Novell's favor -- it will effectively bankrupt SCO and (possibly) bring this ridiculous lawsuit mercifully to an end. For those of us with with suspicious minds, it also has the feel of poetic justice in that the money Microsoft and Sun spent to kill Linux winds up going to a Linux distributor (Novell owns SUSE) to defend a major Linux contributor (IBM).
- Novell owns the copyrights and not SCO.
- SCO needs to give Novell a full accounting of unreported money it owes Novell for SVRX licenses.
- Novell wants to court to order SCO to comply with their contract, which gives all the royalties from SVRX to Novell.
- Novell has the right to waive SCO's claims on UNIX code. Including those against IBM.
- Novell wants the court to issue a "declaratory judgment" that Novell has the right to audit SCO's performance to make sure that it doesn't take any more of Novell's money.
- SCO needs to put all the money it "converted" (i.e., "stole") from those licenses into a constructive trust. (This is the one they're fussing about now. Sun and Microsoft gave SCO a bucket of cash to carry on the lawsuit against Linux under cover of a UNIX license. But SCO is supposed to give UNIX license money to Novell.)
- Number seven repeats number six and asks for the trust again. Eh, lawyers. Go figure.
- Number eight asks for the trust again, but adds punitive damages for swiping the money in the first place. Since SCO has already spent most of the cash, this is pretty much just adding insult to injury.
- Finally, Novell wants a complete accounting of all SVRX agreements or "other agreements relating to royalty bearing products." That's because SCO was claiming that the Sun and Microsoft agreements weren't "real" SVRX agreements, so SCO didn't owe Novell any money. Novell wants an accounting to make sure SCO isn't hiding any more ill-gotten gains.
So, yeah, the cash is a big deal and it's going to bankrupt SCO. Couldn't happen to a more deserving bunch of fellas. But read number four again. If Novell has it's way, the IBM case is gone too because SCO never had the right to sue in the first place.Of course, there are always IBM's counterclaims, but it's unlikely there will be anything left after Novell is done.
And, of course, the DVD players are digital already. Which, I suppose, is the whole point. The analog audience has been dwindling for years, so it's not digital per se that's the problem. It's all the boneheaded stuff (DRM, DMCA, et tedious cetera) that's been getting glued on during the transition.
Penguins.
Meanwhile, Red Hat's lawyers haven't renewed their objections to letting IBM go first. It looks like they're perfectly happy to let the Nazgul do all the heavy lifting. By the time the smoke clears on IBM and Novell, Red Hat's team will have a slam dunk.
Then along come the patent trolls. These people don't have any viable products to defend, so they aren't interested in swapping patents. They just want cash. Its an unforseen consequence of the new rules that the big players don't like.
But now they have a hand in screening new patents. Consider:
Note that the huge pile of dubious patents already granted aren't up for review. Adding another layer of review will probably slow down matters for big companies as well, but everything already granted is getting a free ride.A reasonable compromise would be to allow different modes for experts and novices.
This problem is chronic as the courts try to figure out how old laws apply to the internet. It applies to pornography, which the courts have held should apply "local standards". What does that mean when a picture posted in Japan shows up in Kansas? Can New York collect taxes from someone who never enters New York just because his computer is dialed into a company located there?
A lot of our laws are based on "where" something happens, so what do they mean when "where" doesn't matter?
This sounds like a business oppotunity for a law firm. Agree to represent Spamhaus pro bono if you get to keep 75% of the take (minus the expenses). Then turn around and file a counter suit against the spammers on Spamhaus' behalf, contending that they really are spammers in violation of US law. Since there is gobs of evidence that these really are spammers, the case should be a slam-dunk.
This is just the latest climb down in the SCO peanut gallery as their media allies find other things to write about. Before this article Rob Enderle already moved from his SCO Should Win article to predicting that SCO's litigation, against IBM or anyone else, is all but done.
The story here isn't that SCO has come up with another lame excuse in another vain attempt to flog the dead horse of their court case back to life, but that even their most ardent supporters are starting to see what's going on.
At a minimum, IBM's sixth counterclaim is for breach of the GPL, which is based on copyright law.
Three of the claims IBM objected to were "negative know how". SCO argued that these were cases where IBM figured out how to contribute something to Linux because they saw how UNIX got it wrong. In other words, that IBM infringed SCO's intellectual property by not using SCO's source code. Wells expressed doubt about the argument -- calling it a "tenuous position" -- but accepted that there was good reason for not providing the source code.
The rest of the claims she allowed really weren't about coding at all. They were claims that IBM employees who worked on Dynix were contractually prohibited from working on Linux. Again, she wasn't ruling on the merits but agreed that this was a case where source code wouldn't be expected.
Finally, there are the items IBM didn't object to; the ones where SCO actually provided source code references. IBM has already said that it's planning to deal with these with a request for summary judgement.
Also on the chopping block, there's another motion on the table by IBM to scrap most of SCO's expert witnesses. It seems SCO was trying to use those witnesses to add a bunch more code to their "final" list of allegedly infringing material. It remains to be seen how much of that survives.
In a nutshell, it doesn't look like enough of SCO's case will survive long enough to make it to trial.
Are you saying big business wants to pay a 50% premium on consulting services?
IIRC, Microsoft used to make contracts where vendors who agreed to go "Microsoft only" would get special considerations (price breaks, joint marketing, et cetera). But, as part of the antitrust deal, they are not allowed to do this anymore. They can give breaks on volume, but not breaks for explicitly cutting out competitors. It's not so much that they don't have a legal right to enforce such contracts; they don't have a legal right to even have such contracts.
And, yes, I'm an English Major.
But my first computer (circa 1965) was a mechanical plastic job with springs and rods that only had three "bits" to work with. Each bit was a plastic tab which slid back and forth so that either a zero or one would display in the window. Programming was done with plastic straws that blocked movement of the rods. You could input data by sliding the numbered tabs manually. You ran one "cycle" by pushing in and pulling out another tab. It came with a few simple programs, including one game (Nim).
What can I say? Dad was kind of a geek.
The plug-in hybrid is essentially an electric car with one important difference. When it runs out of electricity, a motor kicks in to recharge the battery. Optimally, it can run all day on electricity alone, but you're not stranded if you need to travel farther than the car's all-electric range. And if the car's recharging motor ran off biodiesel, so much the better.
I don't think we're ever going to get to zero-emissions, but we should be able to do a damn sight better than we're doing now.