Wow! [LWN.net]

Wow!

Posted Nov 14, 2003 17:31 UTC (Fri) by ccchips (guest, #3222) [Link]

I have heard little positive impression of Forbes amongst the technically knoledgeable or the free-software advocators.

I have also noticed that the American press seems to know how to sniff out where the money is, and become the American corporate sycophant press.

Add that to the fact that people actually allow journalists to remain this clueless, and you get:

Stupid people who know how to curry favor from the rich.

Gee.....sounds like what the original settlers were trying to get away from. Isn't that interesting?

Wow!

Posted Nov 14, 2003 19:02 UTC (Fri) by iabervon (subscriber, #722) [Link]

What I find weird is how Forbes, which can generally tell where the money is, seems to generally believe SCO when it talks about IBM. You'd think that Forbes would notice that IBM rounds off its net worth by SCO's value. If IBM had known how annoying SCO would be in the press, they'd probably have bought SCO out of their advertizing budget and considered it money well spent.

Wow!

Posted Nov 14, 2003 19:57 UTC (Fri) by oak (subscriber, #2786) [Link]

Well, the question of a legal validity of GPL licence is a risk to IBM (who doesn't have a definitive answer about GPL to its clients), so I don't think they mind making a precedent of it too much.

It doesn't matter if SCO in the short run throws mud all around as on the long run everybody taking SCO seriously will be laughing "stock" of others.
Crushing SCO in court is much better publicity than bying dregs of a dying company.

Wow!

Posted Nov 14, 2003 22:19 UTC (Fri) by ccchips (guest, #3222) [Link]

What would make me happier than anything is if the underlying issues could be resolved indefinitely.

The problem is that the United States government appears to have bet the farm on copyrights, and I suspect that this will seriously damage world culture, at the very least (think of all the orphaned or neglected films that could have gone into the public domain by now, not to mention the billions of words of fiction and non-fiction that have been written since 1903, and are no longer available to new readers because the publisher doesn't think they're worthwhile enough even to donate to the public domain, or is so greedy as to keep them bottled up. Again, here we have rich people deciding what artworks shall live or die. This is proposterous.

With this Linux fight, we're taling about some jealous, greedy, unscrupulous people who believe they've figured out how to manipulate this out-of-control legal system's idea of copyrights into big benefits from stockholders. Unfurtunately, any company which buys SCO could very well dig up this nonsense again, for up to and in excess of 100 years.

To me, this is sad and sickening, and doesn't make me proud to be an American citizen.

Wow!

Posted Nov 15, 2003 0:37 UTC (Sat) by edvac (guest, #13074) [Link]

So very, very eloquently stated, ccchips!!

Wow!

Posted Nov 15, 2003 3:42 UTC (Sat) by ccchips (guest, #3222) [Link]

Thank you--you're very kind.

I've noticed that caffeine and Friday afternoons do that to me....

Wow!

Posted Nov 15, 2003 7:33 UTC (Sat) by wolfrider (guest, #3105) [Link]

> If IBM had known how annoying SCO would be in the press, they'd probably have bought SCO out of their advertizing budget and considered it money well spent.

--Why throw good money at Bad A$$H0135?

Wow!

Posted Nov 15, 2003 3:41 UTC (Sat) by ccchips (guest, #3222) [Link]

Let's see....

Yet another Operating-system Reconstruction Kit.....from the Free Software Foundation.....

GNU/YORK....

Isn't there a place called New Lennox?

Wow!

Posted Nov 17, 2003 22:14 UTC (Mon) by emk (guest, #1128) [Link]

it would be hard to run a "GNU/Linux" operating system with a different kernel.

Actually, Debian seems to have mastered this trick. There's a bunch of GNU/Whatever versions of Debian which run on alternative non-Linux kernels. Granted, they don't run well, but that's just a simple matter of debugging and debugging and debugging...