I had to post a news thread

[walktalker]

(The withdrawal was too strong )

SCO Slaps IBM With Injunction
SCO Group announced Monday that it has filed a permanent injunction seeking to bar IBM from distributing or selling the AIX Unix operating system. It's the latest skirmish in an ongoing big-business war that ultimately could determine the future of open-source development. Independent Linux developers, who have threatened to file their own lawsuits against SCO, soon may join the fight. "Today AIX is an unauthorized derivative of the Unix System V operating system source code and its users are, as of this date, using AIX without a valid basis to do so," said SCO attorney Mark Heise.
http://www.wired.com/news/business/0,1367,59266,00.html

Mary Bono's Raring to Run RIAA
Rep. Mary Bono (R-Calif.), who is forming a new congressional caucus on piracy and copyright issues, also wants to run the music industry's lobbying organization in Washington, a spokeswoman said Monday. Replacing the departing chief executive of the Recording Industry Association of America would be her "ideal job," spokeswoman Cindy Hartley said. She added that Bono isn't actively pursuing the job and plans to run for re-election. Political watchdog groups in Washington questioned the idea of someone being a possible job candidate for the music industry's lobby and also a founding member of a caucus focused on some of the industry's most important policy concerns.
http://www.wired.com/news/politics/0,1283,59274,00.html

The MP3 Economy
The going rate for downloading songs from online music services like Apple's (AAPL) iTunes Music Store, MusicNet, Pressplay, and Rhapsody is about $1 a pop. Yet the economics of recorded music sales haven't changed much since the vinyl era -- despite the fact that digital files cost very little to produce and distribute. So how much of your buck makes its way back to the artists? Not much, though it's clearly a better deal than they get from piracy.
http://www.business2.com/articles/ma...,49472,00.html

Clean air at the Internet truck stop cafe
Each night, truck drivers across the United States pull into parking lots off the Interstate to catch some sleep. They leave their engines running. They have to. It's the only way to power a truck's air conditioning or heater -- plus the refrigerator that many long- haul rigs carry -- without killing the battery. Those idling trucks burn fuel, up to 2 billion gallons each year, by one estimate. They also pump millions of tons of pollutants into the sky while their drivers sleep. A Knoxville, Tenn., company wants to switch off those engines.
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/articl...#038;type=tech

Defense Dept. backs next-generation Net
The U.S. Department of Defense said it plans to support the next-generation Internet, known as Internet Protocol version 6, in as little as five years. In a briefing Friday, John Stenbit, assistant secretary of defense for networks and information integration, said the Defense Department hopes to move to IPv6 by 2008. He said department acquisitions taking place after October of this year must be IPv6-compatible in order to help the military gear up for the transition. "What we're trying to do is get our folks in the position that whenever the decision is made on the outside to switch, we're ready," Stenbit said. "And more importantly, on our own internal systems, which we control a little bit more, we're going to then be prepared." Stenbit stressed that the military's embrace of IPv6 would be an evolutionary process.
http://news.com.com/2100-1028_3-1017861.html?tag=cd_mh

Sony to offer music downloads in U.K.
Sony Music said Monday that it would begin selling music downloads in Britain for its top artists, making it the last among the major recording labels to join Europe's music download bandwagon. But the long-awaited announcement comes with a hitch. Sony, home to such artists as Michael Jackson and Jennifer Lopez, will not sell song downloads to European Internet users outside the United Kingdom. "We're in negotiation with Sony for the other territories," said Charles Grimsdale, chief executive of OD2, the technology provider that brokered the deal. "Hopefully, we'll be able to bring Sony onboard across Europe fairly soon."
http://news.com.com/2100-1027_3-1017346.html?tag=cd_mh;)

[Ðiego]

Bravo! Bravo! Encore! Encore!

Don't EVER stop again!


Ð

[Smoketoomuch]

SCO is absolutely crazy. Now it claims that every single *nix (including BSD) is a derivative of their crappy codebase, and wants to extort 3 billion from Big Blue. It also threatens to sue linux vendors, and basically everyone in the world who uttered the name unix.

It claims that linux could not reach the performance, scalability and enterprise readiness it currently has without IBM disclosing trade secrets related to their (SCO's) System V code. Enterprise scalability depends on:

symmetric multi-processing (SMP)
The ability to allocate work in a computer among multiple processor chips in such a way that all are as efficiently utilized as possible, leading to completion of programs in the shortest possible time.

journaling file systems
Construction of an operating system's code for managing hard drives and other storage devices in such a way that data cannot be lost or garbled by power outages or most categories of hardware failure.

logical volume management (LVM)
The ability to make multiple physical disk storage devices appear to be a single large disk volume, incorporating redundant storage and error checking such that the failure of any one of the physical volumes still allows all the data to be recovered.

non-uniform memory access (NUMA)
A method of configuring a cluster of microprocessors in a multiprocessing system so that they can share memory locally, improving performance and the ability of the system to be expanded.

hot-swappable hardware
The capability to add and remove hardware while the system is running, without interrupting processing.

support for large memory address spaces via 64-bit processors
Large database

Now the fun part:
Linux had SMP support before SCO's own products, UnixWare and OpenServer.
Linux had 64 bit support 5 years before IBM's involvement.
Journalling filesystem: linux supports not one, but 4 journalling filesystems I know of, and the one that became the de facto standard was developed by RedHat (ext3). It also has JFS (from IBM, that was developed by IBM not for unix, but for OS/2), ReiserFS, a completely independent filesystem (something that Microsoft wanted WinFS to be by 2005, which won't happen anyway), XFS (donated by Silicon Graphics - I presume SCO would sue them as well).
They likened linux to a bicycle and unix to a luxury car before IBM's involvement, claiming that Unix could scale up to 64 processors, while LInux (the 2.4.x series) could scale up to 8 processors. It is interesting, however, that their own UnixWare product scales well only on 2-4 processors. The best summary in OSI's position paper:

SCO/Caldera's claim to own the scalability techniques certainly cannot be supported from the feature list of its own SCO OpenServer, a genetic Unix. The latest version[40] advertises SMP up to only 4 processors (a level which SCO's complaint dismisses as inadequate), no LVM, no NUMA, and no hot-swapping. That is, SCO/Caldera is alleging that IBM misappropriated from SCO technologies which do not appear in SCO's own product.

The most disgusting part is this line of reasoning: since Linux is free, its available for terrorirsts worldwide, in Libia and Syria and so on, so IBM broke export laws of US by providing the terrorist world with a powerful OS. Well, the terrorist part might be true after all, since Pentagon uses Linux, and so does NSA, and guess what: they submit changes to the linux kernel back to the community in compliance with the GPL. Bravo SCO - I believe they are going down in flames after this. Hiring Al Gore's lawyer might no bode very well for them in the White House either.


Read OSI's (Open Source Initiative) paper on this if you're interested: http://www.opensource.org/sco-vs-ibm.html

[multi]

ah...
didnt fully understand what parts of linux they were claiming as theirs..thx

what proof have they got..that terrorists use linux above windows..eh..maybe they even use mac's..?

WT is just teasing us..
more, more,more....

(i am ordering a fresh batch of virtual cookies..tomorrow.. )

[Smoketoomuch]

Originally posted by multi
ah...
didnt fully understand what parts of linux they were claiming as theirs..thx

multi, no one fully understands what parts of the linux kernel they are talking about! They offered their 'proof' under an NDA (non disclosure agreement) that's so strict, that no sane person who wants to do coding in his or her life would sign it, basically preventing anyone with a good knowledge of the linux kernel to verify their claims. Furthermore, they showed some 80 lines of code but speak about hundreds of thousands. That 80 lines were mainly comments. The funny thing is, comments don't change the compiled binaries, besides comments were ruled irrelevant by the court in the BSD wars of the early 90s.

80 lines! If you count the lines in the linux kernel (find . -iname \*.h -o -iname \*.c | xargs cat | wc -l) you'll find that there are 3+ millions, not counting the modules.

And not that they filed a permanent injunction. If there was any truth behind their claims, thay would have filed a preliminary injunction, to stop further 'damages'. Permanent injuntion is granted after a court verdict, while preliminary injunction can be granted right now. You only need to convince the court that your claims are valid. You see? By requesting a permanent injunction they are avoiding having to prove anything, because (as most analyst believe) they don't want this to reach the courts. They want to be bought by IBM - that was their first intent. Having failed that (IBM not taking the bait) they are spreading FUD and threats in a publicity stunt to raise their stock prices. Which is succeding, for half a year ago SCO stock was 0.90 $ - now its 10 $.

This is the first lawsuit I follow in details, for two reasons:
1) Its like a soap opera. SCO everyday surprises the world with something that is utterly crazy, thus very entertaining. (see linux and terrorists, even though it turned out to be that 9/11 guys used NT to exchange emails). Besides, export laws in the US are mainly about export of hardwares, with the one exception of cryptography. They are playing the 'terrorist card' to ride the current wave of paranoia in the Bush administration.

2) its educational. I learned a lot of things about these proceedings (also, the trick above to count the lines in the linux kernel - I knew those commands separately, but it didn't occur to me to use it that way - I mean it was logical after I saw it (use find to filter source files in the /usr/src/linux/kernel directory, pipe the result to cat while telling cat - with xargs - to diplay the content of each file one after the other - but piping that output to the wc command with -l (to display line count instead of word count). I saw that on slashdot. I learned about (I don't say that I know it, its just I never heard of this trick) what shorting means in the stock market, and many more.

So its entartainment + information = me likes it. I love information. I know my enthusiasm seems somewhat crazy, but think of as reading a magazine, new scientist, pcworld or something just for the sake of being informed, learning something, and just for the fun of it.