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Letters to the editorIrresponsible SCO
I haven't seen much discussion of this in the Linux community, perhaps because the charges are so vague, but I thought something meaningful could be said. Andy ------- http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/wlg/2889 Reference: http://news.com.com/2100-1016-991622.html A lot of brickbats are coming the way of SCO since it launched a lawsuit against IBM on the grounds of trade secrets. What's scandalous is not the choice to resort to a lawsuit--because companies have to defend these sorts of things in court in order to preserve their meaning--but the disregard for the needs of Linux users, developers, vendors, and watchers everywhere. SCO chose a low road indeed, trying to maximize its legal flexibility instead of acting like a member of a community. Linux supporters are worried about this for good reason. The lawsuit inevitably recalls the suit AT&T brought against the Berkeley developers of BSD in the 1980s. Then as now, the issue was that developers had access to UNIX during the time they developed their own code. The AT&T complaint involved copyright rather than trade secrets, but the parallels are unmistakable. Although my memory may deceive me, I believe AT&T never demonstrated that a single line of BSD code originated in UNIX (which officially should be written in all-caps). The lawsuit was resolved after many years, but a lot of people blame the confusing around the suit for the stagnation of BSD and its inability to take off at the crucial moment when people were looking for a free software operating system. (I doubt that suit was the problem, but it did waste time and make a mess of things. AT&T sold its rights to UNIX long ago, apparently recognizing that it was managing every aspect of that valuable technology with the same incompetence that it had conducted the BSD lawsuit. As intellectual property, UNIX bounced around for a while and ended up at SCO. It's probably no coincidence that SCO decides to act the heavy around this period when many observers believe UNIX is dying and that Linux will take over where it stood. But they know very well what problems and bad feelings the BSD lawsuit reached. They know how many people (roughly) depend on Linux day by day. What would a responsible company do to uphold its rights while allowing the world to continue? SCO could have examined Linux code and determined where their purported trade secrets lay. They would then have widely publicized the disputed code. They'd say, "Don't use JFS" (or whatever it happened to be); "we're litigating it." Whatever components were in dispute could quickly be pulled out of the kernel; users could depend on other components for whatever functionality they needed. Of course, SCO's lawyers wouldn't tell them to do this. I'm sure the lawyers want as wide a field to play on as they can get. And it is not they who will be appalled when play is done and they discover the whole field has been turned into a desert. SCO can still overrule its narrow-minded lawyers and take a high road. If they've got a claim, make it clearly. That is what the public deserves. Judging from the scattered news reports I've read, they refused to be specific even in the legal complaint they sent the court. And this hand-waving is a tell-tale sign of weakness. We are all justified in assuming, till we have evidence to the contrary, that SCO's lawsuit will go the way of the evidence the Bush administration waved about excitedly for months concerning aluminum tubes purchased by Iraq, now revealed by weapons inspectors on the ground to bear no relation to weapons of mass destruction. But millions of users around the world are in limbo until we know for sure, and there is no reason for that except malice or hamfistedness on the part of SCO. Andy Oram
In defence of RPM!
Hi, I was reading the distrowatch artcile (Is RPM Doomed? http://www.distrowatch.com/dwres.php?resource=article-rpm) which contained was a long rant against the incompatabilities of binary RPM's across distributions. Although the article did point out a few ways things can be improved I feel as though I must jump in with a little pro-RPM evengelism :-) Firstly a quick question. Why is binary compatibility required? The majority of applications your likely to look at are source based. If the binary RPM exists then there should .src.rpm nearby. In my experience 99% of dependancy problems are solved by simply building the binary RPM yourself. I can't believe your suggesting moving over to a source based distribution because: emerge application saves a few lines over: rpm --rebuild application.src.rpm rpm -ivh ~/rpm/RPMS/applictaion.rpm I'll grant that Gentoo's source based system offers a lot when it comes to large multi-component builds. However if your really that up for the bleeding edge you'll find living on Manrake Cooker (or Debian unstable) costs you less time in the long run than constantly rebuilding common components. In fact I run Mandrake Cooker on my main desktop and I've had very few problems with running a: urpmi.update -a urpmi --auto-select every few days. I can leave the heavy lifting to the Cooker people and concentrate on the apps I'm actually interested in. But arguments about ease of building asside the biggest difference rpm makes to my life is knowing where all the files on my PC come from. Having in the past lived/survived a windows environment where your never quite sure if a DLL is left over detruitus or an essential system component I find the ability to do a: rpm -qf /usr/bin/randomfile a godsend. As a bonus I know if I un-install a package from my system all its files go with it leaving nothing lying around. As I have consistently found with open source tools its easy to get frustrated at percieved inadaquacies at first but if you invest a little time reading the documentation/playing with the app your experience is drastically improved and you'll wonder how you got along without it. Briefly returning to the problems of people who distribute binary only rpm's (of which is concern mainly to the commercial software people) there is a solution. Build your binary RPM's for the big 3 (RedHat, Mandrake, UnitedLinux) and build a forth statically linked RPM for the rest. Regards, -- Alex, homepage: http://www.bennee.com/~alex/ Everyone is a genius. It's just that some people are too stupid to realize it.
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