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Authored by tiger99 on Sept 4, 2017 11:52:27 GMT
I tried to set this up as requested by someone a while back, and nothing showed up. Maybe there was a long time delay, or I needed to log out and in? Anyway, here it is. Use and enjoy!
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Authored by tiger99 on Jul 1, 2017 14:25:36 GMT
I appear to have admin rights, but have never exercised them except to delete a duplicate post ages ago, and just now, approve sign-up of someone who had been waiting since March.
Who is supposed to be running the site now?
I probably could set up things as required, but what exactly do we require?
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Authored by tiger99 on May 6, 2017 11:53:36 GMT
After all this time, do you really expect it to be quick? Everything about this case has happened on a glacial time scale so far. But it would be nice to have a result! I don't know which year it might be... -
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Authored by tiger99 on Mar 17, 2017 13:32:40 GMT
My birthday is on the 25th. This could be a nice present, slightly early, if justice is done.
Or will we have to wait weeks or months for the verdict?
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Authored by tiger99 on Aug 26, 2016 12:37:40 GMT
Graet stuff, thanks for posting. Against Mariott, SCO had no chance at all. But their lack of factual support for McBride's allegations also had something to do with it.
IBM were taking no chances, so sensibly they hired the best. But I don't think his considerable talents were necessary. I think Judge Wells summed up the problem SCO had, "Is that all you have got?"
On the other hand he deserves a boost to his career following the demise of SCO because he brought tangible benefit to the whole world. One of the good guys. He must be very patient, as must have been the various judges, to stick with what should have been a quick and simple case for so long.
I wonder what happened to the reputations of the lawyers acting for SCO?
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Authored by tiger99 on May 27, 2016 7:17:51 GMT
It is on the BBC news. Sorry, using phone and don't yet know how to make link.
The only point worth noting is that the BBC say that Oracle are prepared to take it to the Supreme Court and meanwhile will be appealing in the Federal Circuit.
The BBC are also aware that a lot hangs on this for other software developers.
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Authored by tiger99 on Apr 26, 2016 9:36:25 GMT
I guess that 25% includes mobile devices, where they failed spectacularly several times. Linux, mostly in the form of Android, is the most prolific OS on that basis, so Linus has in fact won his battle, on phones and tablets, but not yet on the desktop. BSD, in the form of Apple, is second. Unfortunately M$ are still dominant on the desktop, although from my personal observations Apple must be catching up. A lot of individual users have i-somethings these days because they are sick of the constant bugs and security holes.
However many businesses will never consider Apple due to the high cost, and lack of suitable application software. If the FOSS developers of stuff like FEA, CAD, SPICE simulation, DTP, etc could find the time to polish up their user interfaces and make them more acceptable, a large market awaits. (Yes, I know time is precious and there are never enough good developers...) The underlying code is generally good, the user interfaces are very variable. Take the Gimp for instance, a massive learning curve. Surely some simplification is possible? Arty types are catered for by the excellent Xara, which is also good for simple block diagrams and anything in between. Commercial software is viable, sometimes. Things like FPGA tools (some costing upwards of 100k) run faster on Linux than on Windoze.
We are ever so close to not needing Windoze at all, but not quite there yet. I can't help but think that Mr. Nadella is well aware of the situation, so M$ are probably hard at work porting Office etc to Linux. I don't think that will go anywhere, as at this point in time anyone who knows Linux already runs LibreOffice (apart from the dozen die-hards who run OpenOffice...).
So what is M$ left with? Windoze 10, giving it away free at the moment. A database? Oracle would like to eliminate them from that area and there are plenty of high quality free alternatives, which again just need some polish as far as the UI goes. Active directory? Not the best ever concept, and Samba can emulate it. X-Box 360, just recently discontinued, so hopefully fewer house fires in the future. Visio, an utter abomination, neither a CAD package nor a sketching program. Office, for now...
I have to wonder what they are doing that will provide their future income...
They could always apply to Judge Cahn to be closed down in an orderly manner.
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Authored by tiger99 on Apr 22, 2016 12:05:18 GMT
BBCA number of us, from early in Groklaw's history, were predicting the demise of the Vile Monopoly, perhaps around this time. It was a mixture of wishful thinking, a realisation that their technology was trash, and the rise of non-PC devices, amongs other things, which led us to speculate. Some more astute people may even have seen a trend in the financial returns, stock price etc. Some time back, it did seem that the tipping point may have been passed, with the utter failures of Vista and Windoze 8, amongst other things. I seem to remember being quite rude about a certain phone which flopped badly, about the time an oil well needed plugging. Didn't they sell about 100, and have to give the remainder of the preproduction batch to staff? Well, today's news seems to show that the actual financials are catching up rapidly with the long term ethical and technical bankrupcy of the organisation. Down, down and down, and no product in sight that will save them. Cloud? Who needs their particular cloud? I don't even know very many people who use M$ at home now. Sadly I have to at work, only a temporary job at least! I think M$ are just fading from the domestic scene, people can take no more of their trashware and are prepared to pay double for overpriced Apple hardware, built by almost slave labour, just to get an OS that does a reasonable approximation to working correctly and is quite secure too. Many of us here will be using much cheaper and even better alternatives....
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Authored by tiger99 on Apr 4, 2016 11:53:01 GMT
Well you should never believe anything that you read on the Web on 1st April! Caveat emptor, or something similar.
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Authored by tiger99 on Apr 4, 2016 11:50:10 GMT
But this is good because it is eroding the profit which BSF would have been making. Their fixed up - front fee must be nearing exhaustion by now. Couldn't have happened to a more deserving bunch of shysters. As far as I can tell, they will be obliged to defend the remnant of the SCOundrels all the way through any Lanham Act claims by IBM.
But their fee most likely does not cover defending McBride and associates if the corporate veil is pierced. For that, he will need to pay for his own lawyer, possibly out of the meagre margin he may be making on some minor Web service things whose names I have forgotten. This may hit him severely in his bank balance and lead to personal bankruptcy. Always assuming that IBM go for the real culprit, instead of giving up once SCO is done.
It may be a simple business decision. Will IBM make a profit, ie extract more from McBride than their additional legal costs? That seems very unlikely, so it depends on how much they value upholding their corporate integrity in court, and they may decide that is achieved once SCO is history.
I know that most of us here would like the corporate veil to be pierced and the villains punished, but somehow I can't see that it is likely to happen now. But I would like to be proved wrong.
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Authored by tiger99 on Oct 19, 2015 17:47:23 GMT
Well, well.... It seems that XINUOS have relocated to California and have introduced a new version of OpenSewer, this time based on BSD. They don't say which BSD variant, but perhaps we can guess, as they later donated a massive $3500. All I can say is that BSD developers greatly undervalue themselves. Of course they have used publicly available BSD code and made private modifications. The folly of the BSD licence allows the stupid UNIX saga to continue for ever. Meanwhile the Vile Monopoly has given OpenBSD somewhat more, still well below the true value of what they are appropriating. Apple of course base their kernel on FreeBSD with proprietary mods. It seems to me that almost every desktop OS is going to be based on xBSD soon, each with different proprietary mods. UNIX wars, round 2..... If only the BSD developers had used the GPL!
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Authored by tiger99 on Oct 3, 2013 8:41:36 GMT
My first ever action as a forum moderator. Accidental double post deleted!
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Authored by tiger99 on Oct 1, 2013 15:36:02 GMT
<a href="http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/09/30/steve_jobs_bounces_out_apples_patent_case/">The Register</a> also has this story.
It is a feature of patent law almost everywhere in the world, except the US and a few other countries, that prior disclosure invalidates any patent. But, just as they go about violating other laws such as Data Protection, a number of large and arrogant US companies and their execs think that they can act in Europe the same way as they can back home. Sadly for them, it just is not so, and the courts reliably will enforce the local law. I seem to remember that not very long ago a US judge was seemingly claiming authority over the EU court system. Well, it doesn't work that way!
All that happened here was that Jobs opened his big mouth and blew away the right to patent something trivial in much of the world, and justice was eventually done. In the EU we have known for a very long time that you don't ever disclose before submitting the patent application, but he took the US-centric view of how the universe works....
It is necessary that the US brings their patent laws into line with the rest of the world, who are not going to budge on this. Otherwise, US industry will continue to suffer from self-inflicted damage, and production of affected items will shift to countries which follow the more conventional style of patent law. Sales, in the US only, of various things will be subject to a "patent tax", to satisfy the rogue corporations and patent trolls.
When goods and "intellectual property" are traded worldwide, stupid and expensive legal problems like this will always continue unless the relevant laws are made basically compatible with each other. The costs are a continuing drain on society at large.
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Authored by tiger99 on Aug 30, 2013 13:03:28 GMT
Has Groklaw not been archived by the Library of Congress? So it is preserved for posterity anyway.
I sensed that that PJ was under a lot of stress when the discussion was under way. But technically she was correct, and we can't just make a complete copy of Groklaw. If you make a private copy, that no-one will ever know about, there is not really a problem, except that it is illegal. A lot of illegal things are done in private, which does not make them right, and the issue becomes whether someone values their integrity, rather than will they be caught. So best not to do it.
Which of course leads to how ownership and copyright of this site are being handled. It may (and I say may, because IANAL) be advisable to have everyone agree to their comments being under a suitable license, most likely a version of Creative Commons, so that this question will never need to be debated again. But that may have a downside, as no doubt someone is going to come along and explain.
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Authored by tiger99 on Aug 29, 2013 10:57:35 GMT
I like this bit:
Matthews said it was a breakthrough day "where old law met modern technology and came out on the side of New Zealand's software innovators".
Software innovators really do win when software is not patentable. It follows that those who lose are not innovators. Now just who could that be? Well, those opposing the ban, for a start. Quite possibly one whose only real innovations were a new form of illegal monopoly (business method) and the BSOD. Then there is the other one who regarded rectangles with rounded corners (admittedly nothing to do with software) as being innovative.
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