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Authored by tiger99 on Jun 15, 2019 0:52:35 GMT
Yes, and I fear that you are right. It is not at all clear if anyone except the SCOundrels in the form of their bankrupcy trustee, or IBM, (and their respective legal teams) have standing to give the legal system a prod.
<rant> In software terms there is a need for Garbage Collection which would clean up unwanted cases by forcing the appropriate action, but I don't know if any group of politicians anywhere have had the collective intelligence to make a legal system that works efficiently (by current and expected near future trends on both sides of the Atlantic they never will), possibly by employing people who would in a real world industry be called Progress Chasers.
If SCO vs IBM had been a proper industrial project seeking a technical solution it would have been done and dusted in less than 6 months. The legal system has to grow up to be fit for purpose in modern times. No sign of that yet.
</rant>
I feel much better after having said that!
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Authored by tiger99 on May 10, 2019 0:59:16 GMT
Just watching the news on TV. Pepsico sued the farmers for growing the potatoes used in their products. It sees that this made them very unpopular, so Pepsico was more or less humiliated into dropping the case. Now the farmers are suing Pepsico, presumably for defamation.
There was insufficient detail to determine whether this was due to patents, but I can't see how else Pepsico could have thought that they had a case. A big US based multinational bully-boy suing people with minimal income is not likely to go down well in court in India, whose legal system was originally derived from English law. It also would present a perfect opportunity for Pepsico's main competitor to gain a lot of sales in India. Corporate stupidity seems to be very common. But can you, or should you be able to patent, or even copyright a vegetable? Unless they are GM, there is plenty of prior art, belonging to God, which is one of the reasons why the human genome can't be patented in many countries, including the UK. I can't see that potatoes should be any different.
Maybe someone will be able to find some better info on this case, and post excerpts some of it within the "fair use" rules, or give us a link? Maybe even write an article?
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Authored by tiger99 on Apr 22, 2019 22:36:35 GMT
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Authored by tiger99 on Jan 25, 2019 18:11:21 GMT
Just spotted this on Zdnet, and it is very bad news indeed. One possible course of action is to find prior art which might invalidate the copyrights. However US copyright law is so far out of line with that of the rest of the world that it seems to allow anyone to claim copyright on anything they like that is not their own creation. As a small-scale example of which I have first-hand knowledge, example, someone in the US claims copyright on the well-known hymn "Amazing Grace" which was in fact written in the English village of Olney in the 19th century, and placed into the public domain, yet someone in the US claims copyright, so when a church in Olney sings it they have to be registered with CCLI, and a small portion of their annual fee finds its way to the alleged copyright owner in the US. The Unix API, for instance, was effectively in the public domain. Oracle will possibly now claim to own that, and that will be the end of almost all FOSS, including the BSDs. The law is in error, because an ignorant and ill-informed court who don't know or care what an API is, made a ridiculously incorrect judgement. (Recall that the original judge was also a programmer and was having none of that nonsense!) That has to be fixed. But in a country where senior judiciary are political appointees, itself a fundamental form of corruption, and the appointer is someone like Trump, "allegedly" put there by Putin, and both incompetent and nasty, there is not much hope of any sensible action from the legal system. But what I wonder is whether there was any copyright statement on the APIs when they were first released by Sun. That, and that alone, should define the current status. You can't allow someone to use something under licence and then tell them they can't. However, I saw a few days ago, and have forgotten where, that the GPL is under attack on the basis that it is a contract, and is not enforceable unless each party gave something to the other. Because the author(s) gave us the code, and we gave them nothing in return, there is apparently not a proper enforceable contract. But if each one of us was required to pay the developer the smallest coin inn our local currency, or even send him/her a postcard, as at least one shareware developer asks for, then it would be valid. I have about 3000 apps installed in Debian, which would be about £30, if I had to pay £0.01 for each. I personally would not mind if it resolved the problem. But you can't go back and change the GPL... Meanwhile Microsoft are probably in the Embrace, Extend, Extinguish cycle again. "Microsoft has announced two new Linux distributions for Windows 10 Subsystem for Linux (WSL), including the first paid-for Linux distro called WLinux. WLinux is a Debian-based distro available for $19.99 from Microsoft Store. The company also announced Ubuntu 18.04, which will be available through the Microsoft Store, as well." wccftech.com/microsoft-20-linux-based-distrowindows-10-1809/Clearly Canonical have let us down too. Not unexpected. And it gets worse. blogs.microsoft.com/blog/2018/04/16/using-intelligence-to-advance-security-from-the-edge-to-the-cloud/Azure Sphere extends their monopoly into microcontroller hardware. Somewhere else, which I can't find, they were talking about putting Azure onto small things like thermostats. That is like a regurgitation of the idiot Gates talking about WinCE. You don't need a microcontroller big enough to run a Linux kernel for tasks like that, not even bigger tasks like a washing machine. You don't even need a proprietary RTOS like VRTX, or a free one like FreeRTOS. You only need a smallish device and some "bare metal" (well, silicon) programming, although "modern" developers seem to know how to use 1000 lines of C++ where a dozen lines of assembler would do the job, better. We, meaning PJ if I remember correctly, and some of us, suspected years ago that SCO were merely a dress rehearsal for some much bigger attack on FOSS. I fear that it is now coming, from Oracle and Microsoft. I wish I had something better to say.
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Authored by tiger99 on Sept 8, 2018 0:38:16 GMT
Yes, there was and is a lot of sharing of technology between manufacturers. It is also true of scanners and at one time there was one company making nearly all DVD drives. But this one seems to be genuine Canon, and the drivers are not recognisable as HP. But common sense has certainly prevailed. It only took about 15 years of nagging at Canon and grumbling about them in reputable forums including Groklaw. I think that Oki may be the last remaining uncooperative major printer manufacturer, but they don't make any products that interest me.
The original licensing terms for Postscript was one thing that messed up the printer industry. We have it on most laser printers now, but rarely or never on inkjets, which is disappointing.
I did not get the model intended as it has gone obsolete and the last one was sold. The newer model should have been TS8150 (same driver) but I actually got TS8151 which is white instead of black, and had to go to Carphone Warehouse/Currys/PC World, the most obnoxious place to buy anything, but to my surprise it was massively discounted. It seems to be well made.
Next task is to exercise it fully and add my findings to the openprinting database to help others choose.
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Authored by tiger99 on Sept 7, 2018 13:58:56 GMT
Why? Canon, at one time seemingly the last bastion of hostility to FOSS, have actually got Linux 32 and 64 bit drivers for many of their all in ones, both the printer and scanner, on their web site.
I have no idea when they gave up the battle, but it is a most welcome move. Some manager somewhere is to be congratulated. He should get a rise for boosting sales.
I urgently need to print some DVD labels, and seemingly only 2 machines will do that now. My old one is broken so I am off to Staples to get a Canon TS8050. They have done the right thing, and they make good printers, so they deserve the business.
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Authored by tiger99 on Jul 6, 2018 15:00:57 GMT
I just had a thought. BSF as they were (I think there were some names changed along the way) were paid up front and are obligated to fight on to the very end of what they were contracted to do, through as many generations of staff as it takes. But what if some corporate calamity, or action by some regulatory agency following some wrong-doing, brought BSF to an end? Would the case die?
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Authored by tiger99 on Jun 22, 2018 11:26:38 GMT
Many of you will remember from Groklaw the fiasco where Ken Brown of AdTI was obsessed with trying to prove that Linus stole code from MINIX. I can't remember how that turned out (well, we know the truth, but whether Brown was ever convinced may not have been revealed).
While looking for something much more useful, I came across <a href="https://www.cs.vu.nl/~ast/brown/rebuttal/">this link</a> which has a series of responses by Andy Tanenbaum, and this time he and Linus were in complete agreement! The Brown guy was being even more nonsensical than I remembered.
The early stuff was definitely seen on Groklaw but I can't remember if Andy's later responses ever made it there. If not, follow the link for some entertainment! You will find that the rebuttals by Brown are all dead links as the AdTI server no longer exists, because AdTI no longer exists. But in following Andy's links you will also find some fascinating details about the history of Unix that may not be documented elsewhere, and other interesting stuff.
<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexis_de_Tocqueville_Institution">Wikipedia</a> has something to say about the rise and fall of AdTI and who funded it. No surprises there, but I will let you look for yourselves. The Chief Culprit denies funding particular pieces of research, but they certainly did put lots of money in the pot, and their responses are rather entertaining.....
Apologies if all of this did emerge on Groklaw, and I missed it.
It all came out this time because I needed to know something specific about microkernels....
By the way, Andy doesn't seem to like very much what Inter have done with Minix. It might have become a challenge to Linux (mostly Android) as the most prolific OS because it resides in most recent Intel processors or maybe the UEFI BIOS replacement (not sure which chip), where it may be used for purposes that the user of the PC does not envisage. If MINIX had been licensed under GPL he could have done something about that.
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Authored by tiger99 on Jun 22, 2018 10:51:06 GMT
Enquiring minds will need to know whether it will end with a bang or a whimper. It is rather looking like the latter. But when?
I know that the US legal system can move at glacial pace, but glaciers do actually move...
Is there any "prior art" concerning the duration of cases with no merit whatsoever? On Groklaw I once mentioned two in the UK, specifically England and Wales, which went on for very many years, one having no merit as it was about a worthless lead mine, and the other of considerable merit as it was about a railway being restored which had been obstructed by a new power station reservoir. But I get the feeling that such cases are in a very small minority. Perhaps an entry in the Guiness Book of Records awaits SCO vs IBM?
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Authored by tiger99 on Nov 23, 2017 23:17:08 GMT
The sad thing is that it is a retired judge, Cahn, that is now trying to pull these stunts. Effectively he takes the place of the rotting corpse. See where his name appears on the documents! He has the ability to end this at any time, but thus far all he has done, as bankrupcy trustee, is spend all of SCO's remaining assets on a team of lawyers who achieved precisely nothing. The legal system is corrupt on a massive scale if it appoints people like him to achieve results like this.
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Authored by tiger99 on Nov 1, 2017 0:42:25 GMT
Am I missing something from a long time ago? It seems that SCO were alleging that IBM deliberately planned to start up and then kill off Monterey and the Itanic just so that they could grab SVR4 source code. But the Itanic failed because it was very late, and most importantly, had no backwards compatibility with X86, whereas the AMD64 came along in a timely manner and was backwards compatible. So what actually happened was that the Itanic failed in the marketplace and IBM just dropped support for a failed product, surely just a normal business decision, neither pre-planned nor with malice aforethought?
Not that it matters now, because judgement on that issue was not reversed.
If what remains is only about SVR4 code in AIX, like other recent cases (I recall that Oracle vs Google was along those lines) the outcome would seem to relate to the amount of source involved. If my memory is correct, that attracted trivial damages, leaving Oracle heavily out of pocket due to legal costs. But this one could go either way, possibly even with the massive win that Darl predicted, because the rotten corpse might in theory be awarded a large amount per copy of AIX.
At least Linux is completely in the clear, and to most of us it doesn't matter how corporations, whether large and successful, or defunct, waste their shareholder's revenue in the courts. It is no longer having the slightest effect on our freedom as individuals, except possibly those of us with an IBM mainframe at home. I doubt that there are many such people!
But as it is costing BSF money, the longer it drags on, the better...
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Authored by tiger99 on Oct 7, 2017 17:05:43 GMT
It is sad that the US legal system did not allow her to throw SCO out of her court when they failed to come up with evidence during discovery. Judge Wells asked: "Does SCO have, can they provide, additional specificity?... I mean, basically, is this all you've got?"
She had stated the entire essence of the several SCO court cases rather succinctly! Thanks to Chris Brown for reporting that day, and of course PJ. www.groklaw.net/articlebasic.php?story=20060414162430240
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Authored by tiger99 on Oct 7, 2017 16:48:10 GMT
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Authored by tiger99 on Oct 7, 2017 16:39:11 GMT
<grumble>
Unfortunately the link no longer points to anywhere near the relevant article. I do wish that others, i.e. deathrattlesports.com and more like them, would configure their web sites properly. A link remains pointing to the right place in perpetuity on Groklaw, or the BBC, or many other sites who process large number of articles. No need to run out of URLs, as an arbitrarily long, and never re-used, numeric ID can easily be allocated to every item. It isn't rocket science.
Apart from that, progress is disappointing. The rotting corpse should have been incinerated quite some time ago.
<\grumble>
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Authored by tiger99 on Oct 7, 2017 16:23:25 GMT
Just found this in Linkedin: All of my work experience before and after SCO was of the startup/entrepreneurial variety. Fun stuff, new, exciting and positive. Then some former colleagues on the board of SCO (previously Caldera) convinced me to come in and try and turn around a company that had fallen from a billion dollar valuation down to a measly six million. They only had $8 million of cash and they were burning $4 million per quarter so I basically had 6 months to complete the turnaround.
What they didn't tell me was the company was in a dispute with IBM over disputed UNIX software code. This led to us filing a lawsuit against IBM, retaining David Boies to represent us, raising $76M to fight the battle, seeing our stock go from $0.66 per share to $22 per share, then falling back down to pennies per share after losing an important trial.
IBM teamed up with Linux programmers worldwide to go against me and I showed up on the cover of Fortune Magazine as "Corporate Enemy Number One". Hey, at least you can say that I was number one at something huh? I was as popular in the tech industry as Donald Trump hanging out at an Oscars after party with a bunch of Hollywooders.
The legal battle is not actually over, 15 years later, the case is in review at the 10th circuit court of appeals in Denver.
Silver Lining: While the courtroom battles were raging, we started a mobile apps business that I later bought out of SCO with some friends. That is where Shout came from. Back to the worlds I know and love - tech startup tied to sports and entertainment.
He is claiming that it was others who started the lawsuits against IBM and others, before employing him! I guess that without that lie, he would have no credibility whatsoever.
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